26.10.2009

Thyssen Krupp Steel - logident, UDL 500

RFID - „powered by deister electronic“

ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe has been building a steel mill in Brazil. The mill produces slabs - a pre-product of steel - which is shipped to the US and Germany for the finishing process. The 20 tons heavy steel blocks are processed there to sheet metall which is used in automotive production. The shipment of the slabs is a highly complex and worldwide logistic process. ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe uses the currently most innovative identification technology for it: RFID (Radio-frequency identification).

Now, RFID-tags are attached to the steel slabs in the Brazilian steel mill before shipment. 60 m high and 30 m wide spreaders on docking platforms out in the ocean are loading the gigantic steel blocks. There are rugged long range readers from deister electronic which collect the data from the attached tags automatically. Regard-less of all weather conditions, the compact readers with integrated antenna allow loading and unloading according to the laoding list without any delay.

„RFID makes it possible to clearly reduce turnaround times“, says Loic Feinbier, Manager of the Center of Competence for RFID Logistics at ThyssenKrupp IT Services GmbH. Every delay costs a lot of money according to the demurrage of the ships in the habour. These costs can be clearly reduced by using RFID. RFID readers optimize the logistic process through the whole transport chain to avoid erronious loading and inform the following processors about the delivery time of the goods.