Omron Solutions:

"Up to that point we had been using bar-code stickers, but they were not reliable in all stages of the coating preparation. The stickers would come loose or get damaged and become unreadable, particularly in the cleaning line. The idea of a solution based on RFID tags came up incidentally, when an Omron representative showed them to us. We had never thought of it ourselves, but on further reflection it looked promising. The tags are resistant to high temperatures and to the chemical solutions used in the cleaning process. To begin with we just put tags on the racks for the specials as an experiment," said Harold Hollander.

300 degrees Celsius The tags are the size of a dress stud and consist of a high-quality plastic molding in which the actual chip - the size of pinhead - is housed. "Initially we had our doubts as to whether the tags would come through the cleaning line unscathed," says Harold Hollander. "It works with widely divergent temperatures, from 20 to 80 degrees Celsius, and some baths contain a caustic solution, which could attack the plastic. As well as that, the trays pass through a series of ultrasonic baths and we were afraid that the frequencies (40 kHz upwards) could erase the data from the chip. For these reasons we ran a number of tests and the tags came through without any problems. "The tags have now passed through the experimental stages and Rodenstock is preparing to furnish all 5000 trays with tags in the near future. "The investment is relatively small and the rewards are great both in functionality and in terms of costs," says Harold Hollander.

"At the moment the tags are only programmed once," explains Pier Nijenhuis, system designer at Rodenstock. "Shortly we are going to write to the tags at each stage in the process, so that we can have current status information throughout production. The bar-code stickers will disappear completely. Also, we can still continue to read the tags during production using a simple hand scanner, and print out an order form at the end of the process." It is really easy to integrate the system into the other IT systems that Rodenstock uses, and even communication with the corresponding PLCs is simple, according to Nijenhuis. "At the moment we use Visual Basic, but you can also use other programming languages, thanks to the ASCII interface."