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RFID AND WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY SPEED UP
PRODUCTION AT CONTINENTAL TIRES
C ontinental AG, headquartered in Hanover, Germany, is a global auto and truck parts

manufacturing company, with 164,000 employees in 46 countries. It is also the
world’s fourth largest tire manufacturer and one of the top five automotive suppliers
in the world.
One of the factories for Continental’s Tire Division is located in Sarreguemines, France.
This facility produces 1,000 different kinds of tires and encompasses nearly 1.5 million
square feet. The production process requires large wheeled carts loaded with sheets of
rubber or other components to be transported from storage to workstations as tires are
being built. Until recently, if a carrier was not in its expected location, a worker had to look
for it manually. Manual tracking was time-consuming and inaccurate, and the plant often
lost track of tire components altogether.
Missing materials created bottlenecks and production delays at a time when business
was growing and the company needed to increase production capacity. Continental found a
solution in a new real-time location system based on a Wi-Fi wireless network using radio
frequency identification (RFID) tags, AeroScout MobileView software, mobile computers,
and Global Data Sciences’ material inventory tracking system software.
The Sarreguemines plant mounted AeroScout T2-EB Industrial RFID tags on the sides
of 1,100 of its carriers. As the carriers move from one manufacturing or storage station to
another, location information about the cart is transmitted to nearby nodes of a Cisco Wi-Fi
wireless network. AeroScout’s MobileView software picks up the location and represents
the carrier as an icon on a map of the facility displayed on computer screens. Fifteen
Honeywell Dolphin 6500 and Motorola Solutions MC9190 handheld computers are used
to confirm that a carrier has been loaded with components or has arrived at a specific
workstation.
Seven of the plant’s tuggers, which are small trucks for hauling the carriers around the
plant, are equipped with DLOG mobile vehicle-mounted computers. When a tugger driver
is looking for a specific component, he or she can use the mobile device to access the
MobileView system, pull up a map of the facility, and see an icon indicating where that
component’s carrier is located. The location tracking system provides a real-time snapshot
of all the components used in the factory.
A bar code label is attached to each component and carrier, and the system starts tracking
that component as soon as it is
placed in a carrier. Plant work-
ers use one of the Motorola or
Honeywell handhelds and the
MobileView software to scan
the bar code labels on both
the component and its car-
rier, which is associated with
the ID number transmitted by
an RFID tag mounted on the
carrier. The scanned bar code
data are stored in a material
inventory tracking system.
The MobileView software
tracks the carrier’s location as

© Caro / Alamy
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