RFID vehicle tracking management for Vehicle Logistics Company

Background
 
Vehicle importer Saturno Trasporti is a vehicle logistics company. Saturno manages newly furnished vehicles received from manufacturers and transports them to dealers or buyers. It operates a fleet of approximately 200 trucks in northern Italy, which delivers these vehicles across the European Union and also send them by rail. Before setting off a particular product to the dealership, it needs a review factorization at the Saturno logistics center. Sometimes, there may be as many as 3,000 vehicles on-site, many of which undergo cleaning, tires replacement, or other services before transportation. Usually, the company transfers about 600 products per day or 100,000 vehicles per year. Its customers include Volvo, Ford, Volkswagen, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), and Daimler.



Challenges
 
1. Traditionally, the position of the vehicle used to be traced manually. Each time a car was moved, operators in the yard manually wrote the last six digits of its VIN on a paper ticket, along with the zone and space number of its parking spot. Several times per day, the workers brought paper tickets to the office personnel, who would then input the new data, which is prone to errors and slow system data update.
 
2. Vehicles are mainly stored in three rental venues covering an area of ​​60,000 square meters. The vehicle storage space has a large space and lacks real-time location information of the vehicle. Through traditional vehicle search methods, Sometimes it takes up to several hours to find a particular car.
 
3. Efficient personnel supervision and management mechanism are difficult to be held accountable once operating errors occur, and personnel management is inconvenient.
 
4. The tracking management of the whole process of vehicle transportation couldn't be optimized, causing inconvenience to the management of vehicle transportation.
 
Solution
 
Chainway's Italian partner TechSigno provided Saturno with a smart parking solution based on the application of the Chainway C71 UHF handheld computer. It comes integrated with barcode scanning, and UHF RFID technology, to achieve vehicle tracking and positioning management, and reduce the impact of human factors, can considerably improve the efficiency while searching for cars.

 

With this solution, the location of vehicles and parking areas got marked with RFID tags and 2D barcodes. Then, every time a worker receives or moves a new vehicle in the batch, he can use the C71 handheld device to scan the barcode on the vehicle document and read the UHF RFID tag installed on the parking space. If employees notice any discrepancies or need to provide other data about the vehicle and its condition, they can use C71 to enter that information or take a photo. Among the peripherals available in the C71, the camera was also used to report any non-conformities (scratches and dents) or to read license plates (in the case of non-new vehicles). Moreover, all data can be transmitted to the back-end system in real-time via the wireless network. Office personnel or operators can view the location information of each vehicle in real-time, and can also check whether everything is operating smoothly in the factory.