All things green

Todays customers demand products tailored to their requirements. This poses the challenge for manufacturing, agriculture and forestry of perfectly combining thousands of assembly parts, products and work stages. The best-value solution is RFID. The technology prevents expensive assembly errors and loss, as well as helping to improve product quality.

The Cambium forest enterprise delivers around 400,000 tree trunks to sawmills and paper mills year after year. In order to reduce loss and damage, the company has used RFID since November 2005. Valuable types of woods like beech and spruce are fitted with transponders. The information saved on these – article number, type of tree, length and quality – can be captured by a reader and passed on to a central database.

Production tailored to customer needs: that’s what BMW is championing in the production of its new 3 series. The most important thing is that the components needed from supplier companies have to be available at the right time. That applies in particular to the wiring harness, as that is what controls the car’s numerous cockpit features. RFID is used to ensure that each car receives the right wiring harness. BMW equips each wiring harness with an RFID transponder containing the serial number, which always correlates to a specific vehicle. At delivery and directly before assembly, the number is verified, meaning errors can be ruled out.