Roba Metals: ATLAS Track&Trace solution

The customer

The Dutch company Roba Metals supplies steel, stainless steel, aluminium and other non-ferrous semi-finished products to customers all over the world. Together the various European sites employ more than 600 people.

The pilot project

Aucxis rolled out an RFID pilot project in the Roba Metals service center and sales office in Genk. On a 20.000m² surface, divided in 4 halls, coils (= rolls) of stainless steel are reprocessed into cut-to-size plates, after which they are stored on pallets. The pallets are delivered from stock or on request to the customer, who in turn processes the stainless steel plates into a final product, for example cutlery, ovens and barrels.

Roba Metals Genk has on average 7.000 pallets in stock, of which about 1.000 pallets are delivered on a weekly basis. 35 employees are involved in the production and logistic flow.

The challenge

In order to localise the correct pallets for dispatch to a customer and to pick them up in the warehouses, Roba Metals worked with a traditional barcode scanner and an Excel file.
As more and more storage space is built, and the pallet locations were not always registered, the search times rose sharply. This while the delivery times are becoming increasingly short: the customer often expects delivery one day after order. 

Roba Metals was therefore looking for a real-time detection and localisation system which could be linked to its WMS. 

Gert Machon, Production Manager

“The down-to-earth approach of Aucxis convinced us to collaborate. Today we are searching together for the best solutions and we achieve great results with our RFID applications.”

The solution

Aucxis suggested implementing the RFID Item Identification & Tracking solution, providing an accurate and up-to-date overview of the internal logistic movements through automatic location and load control.

There has been chosen to work with UHF RFID technology, enabling bulk scanning. Furthermore – in contrast to barcodes – no line-of-sight is required to read out the tags.

• Each pallet is equipped with a RFID tag.
• The bridge cranes were equipped with an antenna to scan the load.
• Forklifts equipped with detection equipment.
• The operators can confirm the identity of the pallets via their touch screens.

The interesting thing about the concept is that the same hardware and technology (our middleware HERTZ) can be used for both identification and localisation.