Van de Vin, a Dutch manufacturer of hardwood window and door frames, previously ran its factory on large-format A0 project drawings distributed across the floor. When a design changed mid-build, every outdated drawing had to be found and replaced by hand, a slow process with an obvious failure mode: someone building from an obsolete sheet.
The fix embeds a UHF RFID dowel tag directly into a beam of each wooden frame, typically the lower right-hand corner, making the frame itself the key to its own paperwork. At the first two workstations, a custom scan head built by integrator RFIDdirect reads both a barcode and the RFID tag, and a handshake with the company’s Matrix ERP system links the physical frame to its live drawing. An LED beacon confirms each step, and from there every workstation shows the current drawing on a touchscreen, with operator feedback captured at each stage.
The hardware behind it is an Impinj R700 reader paired with a Times-7 A5020 circular-polarised antenna, supplied by distributor Cisper, with timber-specific UHF dowel tags designed to read reliably inside wood.
The results: roughly €30,000 a year saved on paper and printing, item processing in under three seconds, and what the company describes as complete assurance that every station is working to the current drawing. The tagged frames also give Van de Vin item-level traceability through production, with idle-time tracking and component verification flagged as next steps.
“Every operational challenge is an opportunity, if you can see it clearly.”
Frits van Calker, director and founder, RFIDdirect
The full case study is published by Cisper.
