Analytica

ARIES is equally useful and affordable to mid size companies such as Midwest Acoust-A-Fiber (Midwest AAF), a mid size auto parts manufacturing firm that is rapidly growing and plans to reach the $50 million mark by 2010. Their main clients are Chrysler, GM and Nissan. Midwest AAF has taken the term “agile manufacturing” to new levels and they needed a tracking mechanism as powerful and flexible as the organization. They faced unique problems in tracking raw materials and inventory throughout their facility, as well as tracking finished goods from the various manufacturing lines to the warehouse and onward to customer shipping. Traditional methods were too rigid for their needs and were not capable of handling the volume they were dealing with on a day to day basis.

Bar-coding all the assets was relatively cheap but ineffective option for Midwest AAF due to tight supply and time constraints. However, a complete RFID solution would have proved to be effective albeit expensive. Here is where Analytica was able to provide an innovative solution that leveraged the functionality of bar codes with enhanced productivity of RFID.

Analytica was able to utilize their existing bar-coding structure to implement a cost effective hybrid system called Crossfire which has the unique capability of integrating barcodes with RFID. Since this was implemented in a phased manner, Midwest AAF was able to get every group involved in the process in a timely manner as well as soften the bottom line of implementing the technology even as they experienced continued growth. Midwest AAF went from getting status updates after a 24 hour time lag to a real time update of raw material, work-in-progress, and finished goods within their manufacturing facility.