A technology that not only solves problems, but also answers questions.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Philosophers have been pondering this question for centuries, even though it does not seem all that important. After all, what kind of consequences could there be from a tree falling in a deserted forest? A spare part that goes unnoticed in a busy warehouse, on the other hand, can have very significant consequences. That's why our engineers decided to ponder a very similar question to the one the old philosophers occupied themselves with. And being a lot more pragmatic than philosophers, our engineers found an answer pretty quickly.
In the past, if a voice recorder, for example, arrived in one of our warehouses, it was in fact there, but our customers were not aware of it at that point in time because it could not be registered in their EDP system immediately. In other words, it did not officially exist in the warehouse even though it was actually there. Several process stages had to be completed before our customers registered an event that had actually taken place a lot earlier and was, by the time they found out about it, already over and done with.
However, now we have found a solution to this problem: RFID technology. This technology is based on two things – electronic tags, also called transponders, which can be attached to any component, and a reader that retrieves all the relevant information about the component from the transponder, and forwards this information to an IT system at the touch of a button and in real time. "Reading" the tags does not require any kind of contact – it works via radio waves. So to go back to the example of the voice recorder arriving at our warehouse: It can now instantly tell our customer where it is – even if it's firmly packed underneath a hundred other components and devices on a pallet. This is possible because the pallet is pushed through an electronic scanner at the entrance to our warehouse. Here, the scanner – just like the hand-held reader – immediately records every component, including all the relevant information, without the need to manually unpack even a single part. Using this system, we have been able to reduce the turnaround time for material by 70 percent.
And our customers will surely agree with us when we say that this does not sound philosophical at all, but rather very concrete and highly efficient.
