Less searching for material. More grip on your floor.
Work orders waiting for parts, work in progress at a location nobody posted, tools drifting between departments. Not because your people are careless, but because every registration is an action that has to happen while the work happens. STOCKflow takes that action away.
We start with one material flow and measure what it gains, before anything is rolled out.
Sound familiar?
If two or more of these situations look familiar, the gain probably does not sit in working harder. We see them in manufacturing, machine building, metalworking, automotive supply, food production, medical production, packaging and industrial supply.
- A work order sits still because nobody knows where the material is.
- Work in progress sits at an interim location that is not in the system, and how long it has been there nobody knows.
- Tooling and tools circulate between departments and drop out of sight.
- Finished product is booked in by hand at the end of the day.
- Returned material comes back but is never posted back.
- The system says there is stock, the floor says there is not.
What it costs
What searching on the floor costs per year
Searches per day
Minutes per search
Working days
Per year
368 hours
Calculated with euros per hour, and with the share of the theoretical gain you actually achieve:
- Conservative
- 147 hours6,624 euros per year
- Expected
- 221 hours9,936 euros per year
- Potential
- 294 hours13,248 euros per year
Worked example based ontwelve searches a day of eight minutes each, over 230 working days. Fill in your own numbers and the figure changes with them. Not a measurement at a customer. The numbers are adjustable: put your own situation in and the outcome follows along.
How it works on the floor
No new system alongside the old one. One action less, at the point where it goes wrong now.
01 / Label at the source
Material, carrier or cart gets a label the moment it enters the flow. If it carries a pallet label today, one with RFID takes its place. That one reads itself. Which label that is depends on metal, temperature and whether it has to go through the wash.
02 / Reading without stopping
A handheld reads a whole cart in one move, a reading point above the conveyor reads whatever passes. Nobody aims at a stripe.
03 / Visible and posted through
In STOCKflow you see what is where and when it was last seen there. The integration with your ERP follows once the physical flow adds up.
What RFID does and does not do in manufacturing
What RFID does and does not do in manufacturing
Wel
- Register several items at once, through cardboard and film as well
- Find items back within a zone, with a handheld that runs hotter and colder
- Record automatically what passes doorways and reading points
- The last sighting of an item: where, when, by whom
- See which step or zone an order is in and how long it has been there
Niet
- An exact real time position to the square meter, that is a different kind of system
- Read reliably on bare metal without a label made for it
- Register at places where the process has no reading moment
- Make up for a bad process: if nobody labels, nothing counts
Metal and liquids disturb the signal. That is not a detail we polish away, it decides the label type and the placement. In the Proof of Value we test that on your material instead of promising it up front.
What changes in practice
The rush order on Monday
The planner asks for a rush and the material is somewhere in the hall. Now you walk over with a handheld instead of calling three shifts.The right mold first time
A changeover starts with the question which mold it is and where it stands. Both are on screen now before anyone takes the forklift.Work in progress that does not stall
Work in progress between two operations sits somewhere for a while and nobody posts it. Now you know where it is and how long it has been there, and past an agreed time it reports itself.Material that does not run out halfway
Below the reorder point it reports itself, instead of the line standing still over a part the system said was there.
Does this fit your production?
Better to know this up front than halfway through a project. If your situation is different, a conversation is more useful than a request.
- Size
- 25 to 500 employees
- Process
- A recurring material flow with fixed moments
- Systems
- ERP or MES in place, integration follows later
- Items
- From a few hundred items to track
How we prove it: a small, paid Proof of Value
Not the whole plant. One material flow, one department, temporary labels. We measure how it goes now first and then how it goes with RFID.
Scope
- One material flow or warehouse zone
- Temporary labels, no fixed infrastructure
- One handheld reader and a limited group of users
- A baseline measurement of time spent searching and registration reliability
- Exceptions are recorded, including the ones that turn out badly
Go or no-go
After the measurement there is a go or no-go on the table, with the numbers next to it. On a no-go it stops and you are tied to nothing. On a go we design the phased rollout with a decision point per phase.
What you are probably thinking
We already have barcodes, why would I switch?
Often you should not. Barcode is cheap and works fine where someone is already holding one item at a time. RFID wins where you want to register several items at once, where you cannot reach the label, or where you have to find something back. The two run fine side by side, and our handhelds read both.
Does this work on our metal parts and carts?
Not with an ordinary paper label. For metal there are special tags with a spacer, which cost many times more but do work. Whether that gives you enough read range in your case depends on the shape of the object and the place of the label. That is exactly why we test it in the Proof of Value on your material.
Do we have to spend months integrating with our ERP first?
No, and we do not want that either. The integration comes only once the physical workflow adds up: labels in the right place, reading moments that fit the work, people who can handle it. Integrating with a process that does not work yet only gives you faster wrong data.