U.K. automaker Land Rover has had great success using RFID tagging to streamline its production lines. It’s an increasingly typical use of the technology in manufacturing – tracking parts inventory to reduce clutter on the floor as well as the total stock they have to carry in inventory. Now, Land Rover is using the same technology to increase efficiency once the parts are all assembled.
The company’s 1940’s-vintage plant in Solihull, England lacks one main storage area for completed vehicles. The vehicles are instead stored in various locations throughout the 308-acre plant, making it often difficult to track which vehicles were located where quickly.
Land Rover now hangs an RFID tag in each vehicle as it exits the assembly line. The tag has a host of data attached—the vehicle identification number, color, model, even the vehicle’s end-market destination. This allows Land Rover to prioritize vehicles for shipment easily—if there is a ship leaving port on a certain day for a specific market, all the vehicles for that ship can quickly be located and prioritized if needed.
“If we need to find all of the vehicles with a V-8 engine headed to the North American market, we can just pull them up on a map with dots that show where every requested car is located within three meters,” says Dave O’Reilly, Land Rover’s manager of manufacturing and purchasing IT. “If we need to make an update to those vehicles or change something before they are dispatched to a carrier for shipping, we can.”
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