In our series of Identification systems in the Logistics Industry, we have now covered Barcode and RFID readers. In this last newsletter in the series, we will be briefly discussing how it all can fit together and some of the surrounding equipment IdentSystem can provide. As mentioned earlier we will discuss RFID tags in a separate newsletter next week from a more general perspective. Fitting a whole system together will naturally depend totally on your own individual processes and setup, we will now present one example of how it can tie together.  A smaller delivery truck comes in with packages intended to be sent to the same destination. As they are offloaded, the Barcodes on each package is scanned and registered and sorted to a pallet intended for that destination. The pallet, when filled, is then coded as a separate item and when picked up by the forklift its barcode is read by a forklift mounted scanner. The tags data is sent to the WMS and in return the driver gets a destination point on his truck terminal, telling him which container he will offload the pallet in. When he reaches the container, its position is read by an onboard RFID scanner with an antenna mounted under the forklift. The RFID tag with location data is embedded in the warehouse concrete floor. When the pallet is offloaded in the container, the driver closes the work order and get informed where to pick up the next pallet. If however the location ID of the RFID tag read at the container is not the intended one, he will not be able to close the process and instead get an error message telling him to deliver the pallet to the right container.  So now we arrived at the last section of this newsletter and will present the accessories Identsystem has for extending the usage of our readers in different ways. First out is the Master/Slave cable for EVS138 which allows two EVS138 barcode scanners to be connected to one Main unit. This can be done for two reasons: 1) letting them work as one wide range scanner and cover a wider area then is possible with only one scanner. For example on very wide forklifts. 2) letting them work in tandem where faults in reading cannot be allowed and compare the data read by each camera to confirm that correct data is read.  Second is our EVS-SPC (Smart Protocol Converter), which in its basic setup is configured as a Serial data converter for RS232. It can convert from one baud rate to another, change stop bits, etc. We choose this to be a modular build so that other features could be installed on request. Such features are: Keyboard emulator, ZIOX host controller, Logic controller with built-in ID translation database – for example where you have to upgrade the tags in your system but the ID:s doesn’t match the values of the previous tags – the EVS-SPC reads in the data from the new tag and translates it to data used by old tags. On request, this EVS-SPC can be customized to match most of your needs. |