Bonfiglioli, the Italian manufacturer of gearmotors, electric motors, planetary gearboxes and inverters, has put seven RFID gates on the loading and unloading bays of its EVO plant at Calderara di Reno near Bologna. Three gates cover goods-in and four cover despatch, and between them they handle around 400 parcels received and 400 shipped every working day. The project reached full production six months after it started.
The installation was carried out by Tenenga, an auto-ID and traceability integrator based at Castel Maggiore, also near Bologna, and formed part of a supply chain digitalisation programme Bonfiglioli began in 2018 when it brought its Vignola and Calderara operations together. Bonfiglioli is a family-owned group with more than 60 years of history behind it. It reported revenue of 913 million euros for 2018 and employs over 3,700 people, half of them in Italy, across 14 production plants, 21 sales subsidiaries and more than 550 distributors worldwide.
What the plant needed to fix
EVO, short for Evolution, is the group’s Industry 4.0 flagship: a 148,700 square metre site where roughly 400 operators work alongside a further 200 office staff from the Discrete Manufacturing and Process Industries business unit headquarters. Parcel handling at the doors was one of the problems management wanted the new plant to solve, and three goals were set for it. Verify that parcels arriving from suppliers were correct. Speed up goods receipt. Eliminate shipping errors at the point of loading. Sitting behind those was a wider ambition, to tie the supply chain together more tightly and standardise how suppliers and freight forwarders interoperate.
Seven gates, four antennas each
The RFID labels applied to the parcels are printed and encoded on Zebra ZT410 industrial thermal printers. Each of the seven gates is fitted with four antennas, all managed by a single Zebra FX9600 fixed reader.
Neither Tenenga nor Bonfiglioli states the operating frequency, but the hardware settles it. The FX9600 is a fixed UHF reader running the EPC Gen2 V2 air protocol, also catalogued as ISO 18000-63, and the ZT410’s RFID option encodes labels of the same class. That puts the deployment squarely in UHF RAIN RFID territory, which in Italy means the European 865 to 868 MHz allocation rather than the 902 to 928 MHz band used in North America. Our RFID glossary covers how the bands and air protocols relate.
As a load passes through a gate, a display tells the operator whether the parcels in transit match the loading or unloading note. A combined light and sound signal backs the display up, so a discrepancy registers even when nobody is watching the screen.
The software behind the gates
Tenenga also built the software layer that sits under the hardware. It is integrated with SAP, the ERP the group runs, and interacts with two further systems: IUNGO, the supplier portal Bonfiglioli uses to exchange documents with its supply base, and Infor, its warehouse management system. Lists of parcels that have passed a gate go to the ERP automatically instead of being keyed in, anomalies are flagged in real time, and gate occupancy is visible live, so bay planning can be worked against actual traffic rather than a schedule drawn up in advance.
With the bays instrumented, Bonfiglioli began pulling suppliers into the scheme. It has 140 of them and started with a first group of 50. That sequencing matters more than it might look: an inbound gate only earns its keep if the label is already on the parcel when the truck arrives, so how far supplier onboarding gets is what determines how much of the goods-in benefit is actually banked.
Training ran alongside the rollout, with courses for every member of staff affected. Tenenga is explicit that this was treated as a change of operating paradigm rather than the arrival of a new piece of equipment, which is a fair description of what happens when a manual document check becomes an automatic one.
What it delivered
Tenenga lists four operational gains from the work: faster and better optimised truck loading and unloading, real-time notification of any anomaly detected, automatic transmission of transited parcel lists to the ERP, and live visibility of gate occupancy to support bay planning.
Simone Bonantini, Bonfiglioli’s Global Supply Chain Manager, put the outcome plainly. “RFID has fully met our requirements: today we are able to track and quickly receive 400 parcels a day and to ship as many again, always with the guarantee that the load is correct.” The quote is translated from the Italian original.
On the strength of that result, Bonfiglioli has said the technology will be progressively extended to all of its other plants.
Read more at https://www.tenenga.it/case-study/magazzino-intelligente-bonfiglioli-rfid/
