Sock maker GEL-AL sees significant ROI in 6-months
03 Jun '08
3 min read
Alien Technology, a leader in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Ultra High Frequency (UHF) products and services, announced that STS, a member of Alien Technology's Value Added Solutions Provider (VASP) channel partner network, has successfully completed a closed loop, EPC compliant tote application for GEL-AL. As a result, GEL-AL, the largest sock manufacturer in Europe, has seen a 40 percent improvement in productivity at its Istanbul manufacturing site.
Based in Turkey, GEL-AL produces over 83 million pairs of socks annually for many of the world's best-known brand names in sportswear. Each day at the company's plant, approximately twenty thousand sock-filled plastic totes travel throughout the various production stations. STS, a leading RFID systems integrator in Turkey, equipped each tote with an Alien high-performance UHF/EPC compliant M-tag (inlay), which has been converted into a plastic ISO card.
Individual totes are pre-programmed with a unique asset code consisting of the tote ID number, the work order and the sequence number. There are twenty 'read points' within the facility, with roughly thirty totes passing the various reading points at any given time.
“Before we implemented a RFID tote tagging system, we used large sacks to transport the socks internally to the various work stations - using barcode labels on the sacks and manually scanning each tote, which was very time-consuming and not very productive,” said Mr. Aydin Dogan,GEL-AL's IT specialist.