Prior to its RFID enabled clothing production, the company had experienced growing pressures from clothing designers to manufacture more garment styles each year with increasingly shorter lead times. Moreover, most of the retailers requested more timely or fashionable products for each season. This forced Lawsgroup to look for a means of supporting a leaner manufacturing process with greater control over each production step, so that the company would produce only what it needed for each order and could react more quickly to order changes.

Under its manual tracking system, Laws explains, once the raw materials were sent into the production process, they entered a "black hole," where they remained invisible until emerging as a finished product. Cut raw materials, to be used to fulfill each order, were grouped together in component bundles, such as sleeves, cuffs and hoods. A hand-written paper ticket with order information was attached to each bundle by a strip of fabric, and bundles were brought from sewing station to sewing station, where the bundles changed from components to completed garments. The garments were then sent to a quality-inspection station. Throughout the tracking process, pertinent information was written to the tickets accompanying each bundle at each station. Sometimes the information was incorrect or illegible, causing production delays.

Under the new RFID-enabled system High Frequency Smart Cards (13.56 MHz) take the place of the paper tickets, and as employees collect the finished goods, they erase and reuse the attached smart cards. The data collected from the cards provides a real-time look at how much each Lawsgroup plant produces throughout each shift.

As the garment components are assembled, workers encode the order information onto the smart cards. They use interrogators located at each workstation to read the smart cards, and they also scan a smart card assigned to each worker as an ID badge. The back-end system uses this data to track how many pieces are completed, as well as how many pieces of each garment order have reached each step in the manufacturing process. This kind of real-time information sharing was not possible with the paper-ticket tracking system.

The back-end system also tracks each worker's output by correlating the badge reads with the bundle tag reads at each workstation. This information is used to help track and reward high-output workers. At the quality-inspection stations, any sewing flaws in garments can be traced back to the workers responsible for them. Law says this information is not used to punish workers, but is taken into consideration as managers relegate tasks in the factories. "We look for each worker's strengths and encourage them," says Laws

Large electronic displays are hung in all production areas, and employees can reference them to track the plant's cumulative progress toward meeting production goals. Lawgroup's IT department developed the RFID system in-house and has integrated it with its enterprise resource-planning (ERP) system. The RFID back-end data system is customized to the company's needs. For example, the system can send alerts to plant managers when incoming orders and current production levels point to an imminent bottleneck.

Thus, from the above case, one can conclude that RFID enabled production tracking system definitely yields improved productions including easier performance measurement and better production decision making. Further what helped the success was a "commitment from management" to see the RFID solution implementation , along with a strong belief in the technology and the use of in-house IT staff to develop the system, rather than relying on an outside vendor.

About the author:

Prakash Kumar Udupi has done his M. Tech. and is Assistant Professor& Dept Head (IT & CAD) AIFD, Bangalore E-Mail : prakashaifd@yahoo.co.in

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