Alvero: detection of pieces of furniture

The customer

Alvero Kantoormeubelverhuur bv is a leading rental company of high-quality office furniture. By means of its own fleet, the company supplies and installs its furniture at its customers within the Benelux countries and Germany.

The challenge

Renting office furniture is an enormous logistic challenge. Many different kinds of expertise are needed, not only for delivering, but also for collecting, cleaning, repairing and storing the furniture. By using RFID technology, the company wanted to perfectly control and organise its growing activities as efficient as possible.

Alvero has been looking for a solution for several years and already carried out tests with various parties, but was only convinced by the solution which Aucxis could offer. That is why Aucxis was engaged to streamline the logistic processes.

RFID technology supports the whole inbound – outbound process. 12 RFID portals detect the incoming and outgoing pieces of furniture. The challenge for Aucxis was to define the most suitable tags in function of the different materials where they have to be put on, such as metal, leather, wood and plastic.

Aucxis has developed a turnkey solution containing the following objectives:

• A clear and correct overview of the stocks;
• An individual tracking of the rental resources;
• A gain of time during loading;
• The correctness of loading;
• The restriction of extra transport and deliveries;
• The registration of the history of the individual products.

The solution

• 12 RFID portals detect incoming and outgoing pieces of furniture.
• Four directional RFID antennas detect all movements in the gate. Two antennas were put on the top bar of the portal. The other two antennas were put left and right in the standing structure.
• Furthermore, a fanless pc with 22” touch screen was mounted on a bracket on the long side of the gate structure.
• The portal was dimensioned for standard dock doors and the colour was adjusted according to the customer’s wishes; red in this case.
• Furthermore, RFID handhelds are used for the inventory of the stock.

Hertz, the middleware software of Aucxis, processes all collected information in an intelligent way and sends it to Alvero’s ERP package. By connecting with its rental application, Alvero provides both its clients and itself with detailed information.