The Hong Kong knitwear company has installed RFID interrogators at 8,000 sewing stations in three of its plants, so that it can record the number of garments made by each worker.
Hong Kong knitwear company Crystal Group is employing passive 13.56 MHz RFID tags to track garments as they are manufactured. The company maintains 15 manufacturing sites in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Macao and Malaysia that produce more than 90 million garments each year. Crystal Group’s clients include GAP, Old Navy, Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Marks and Spencer and Ann Taylor. Three of the manufacturer’s sites currently use RFID technology to track the number of products workers manufacture during their shifts.
Because of the large volume of products it makes, Crystal Group emphasizes speed and quality in the production process. To accomplish this goal, the company closely monitors work-in-progress from sewing newly cut fabric to shipping completed garments, as well as the planning of workloads and payroll for the company’s many sewers.
Until now, the company has relied solely on a bar-code-based system to track its plants’ production process. At the start of a shift, employees use a bar-code scanner installed at their sewing station to read the bar-code number printed on their ID card. They then scan the bar code printed on a paper form accompanying each bundle of items they sew. The company utilizes this data to assist in calculating work hours, and to track the productivity of a specific point on the manufacturing line. The bar-coding system, however, has several shortcomings: The bar-coded forms are often difficult to read, can become crumpled in the garment and frequently do not scan properly.
The company wanted a faster and more accurate scanning process, as well as a system that could be integrated into its own back-end management system. Therefore, over the past three years, Crystal Group has been gradually implementing an RFID solution provided by Malaysian IT solutions and technologies company GPRO Technologies.
The firm is now using GPRO’s Shopfloor Data Tracking (SDT) system with RFID interrogators installed at every sewing station in some of its facilities. GPRO custom-built and provided all the hardware, including RFID-enabled ID cards and garment labels, label printer-encoders and interrogators, which comply with the ISO 15693 RFID standard.
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