VW to roll out smart supply chain with IBM and Intermec RFID

Following a one-year pilot project with IBM – using the company's RFID container management solution and WebSphere Premises Server RFID middleware – VW is now deploying the new system at its central logistics hall at one of its major plant in Germany. Klaus Hardy Mühleck, Volkswagen group CIO, explains that shipping containers carrying auto parts destined for VW will increasingly be fitted with RFID tags. Information on the containers will be collected automatically by readers at key locations in the supply chain – from suppliers' shipping departments, through transportation, into VW and on into storage and the assembly line. "Our long-term goal is to implement an integrated, paperless production and logistics chain throughout the whole group," says Mühleck. "The pilot project showed that we can reliably integrate RFID technology into our business processes at a low cost." For the pilot, Volkswagen fitted around 3,000 shipping containers with passive RFID tags, supplied by Intermec. The technology has now been refined so it can also automatically register metal containers, which normally interfere with RFID. The tags were used on containers carrying sunroofs for the new VW Golf. Mühleck says that RFID readers at the entrances to the manufacturing line, along with mobile handheld scanners and forklifts were used to identify the containers and their contents.