Avianor, a Canadian aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul company based at Montreal-Mirabel International Airport, has put RFID read points inside its tool cabinets and tool cribs, added portal read zones for the larger tools that never fit in a cabinet, and wired the resulting read events into the ERP system it already uses to assign tools to technicians. Xerafy, the industrial RFID tag manufacturer that supplied the tagging layer, has published the deployment as a customer case study.
Avianor has more than 30 years in commercial and military aircraft maintenance, airframe MRO, completions and cabin interiors, working for airlines, lessors, integrators and OEMs. Its own figures put it at over 300,000 square feet of hangar, shops, warehousing and offices at Mirabel, with 465 or more full time and contracted staff and airside access to the field. It runs an A220 Center of Excellence and holds engineering approvals from TCCA, the FAA and EASA.
Four aircraft positions, two bays, several kinds of tool storage
Tool control at Avianor is a layout problem before it is a technology problem. Maintenance runs across four aircraft positions in the hangar, split between two bays, and tool storage is deliberately distributed so that technicians working one aircraft are not walking the length of the building to fetch something. Avianor did not centralise everything into a single tool room. That decision helps the workflow and makes visibility harder, because tools end up spread across cabinets, cribs, shadow boards and open storage areas.
A tool crib, for readers coming to this from outside aviation and heavy manufacturing, is a controlled storage area where tools are issued and returned against a record, usually a caged or partitioned space rather than a cupboard. A shadow board is the simpler version: a panel with each tool’s outline marked on it, so a gap is visible at a glance. Both work well for the tools they hold, and neither tells you anything about a tool once it has left.
Manual counts and one-by-one barcode scanning were the gap Avianor set out to close. Barcodes need line of sight on every individual item, which does not scale when tools are stored densely and handled constantly by multiple technicians across two bays.
Storage read zones and portal read zones do different jobs
The system uses two kinds of read point, and that distinction is the interesting part of the design. A storage read zone sits inside a cabinet or crib and answers an inventory question: is this tool where it is supposed to be. A portal read zone is a fixed reader and antenna arrangement at a doorway or access point, and it answers a movement question: did this tool physically pass through here, and when.
The case study is blunt about why both are needed. A smart cabinet controls the tools inside that cabinet. It says nothing about a large tool kept in open storage, a tool hanging on a shadow board, or a tool being carried out of the controlled area. Portals cover what the cabinets cannot see.
Four event types feed the ERP
The software model reduces everything to four events. Tool present means the tag was detected in its expected storage location. Tool removed means it was not. Tool checked out links a specific tool to a technician or a work context. Tool moved through portal confirms a physical passage through a controlled access point.
Keeping those last two separate is the part most tool tracking projects get wrong. A checkout record is an administrative claim about who has the tool. A portal read is physical evidence that the tool actually left, and a second read is evidence it came back. Avianor’s ERP stays the system of record for assignment and reporting, and RFID feeds it clean events rather than standing up a parallel tool database alongside it.
Who supplied what
Xerafy, in business since 2010 and headquartered in Singapore, makes rugged RFID tags for metal assets, including compact on-metal formats small enough for hand tools where a conventional label would foul the grip, the clearance or a calibration surface. Anantics, a Xerafy authorised partner and an IoT integrator whose own real-time location platform ingests RFID, BLE, UWB, LoRaWAN and GPS data, supplied the reader infrastructure. Avianor’s internal software environment connected the reads to its workflows.
The case study does not name tag models, antenna counts or a tagged tool population, and it does not state an operating frequency for this installation. Both suppliers work in passive UHF: Xerafy describes its portfolio as passive UHF RFID tagging and sensing, and the fixed readers and gate readers Anantics lists are EPCglobal UHF Class 1 Gen 2, the air interface better known as RAIN RFID. That band is what makes bulk reads inside a full cabinet and portal reads at walking pace practical in the first place.
Why tool accountability is a safety issue, not just a stores issue
FOD, foreign object debris, is any loose item left where it should not be: a spanner in a wing tank, a socket in an engine nacelle, a cable tie on a taxiway. The resulting foreign object damage is a well documented cause of aircraft damage, and the industry standard for preventing it, NAS 412 from the Aerospace Industries Association, explicitly covers tool and item control, accountability, inventory and traceability. A system that can show a tool was present, was checked out to a named technician, passed a portal and came back is doing FOD prevention work as well as inventory work.
The reported benefits follow that logic: better visibility of stored tools from cabinet and crib reads, movement confirmation for larger tools from portal reads, and ERP-connected records linking tool identity to technician assignment and return, supporting accountability, inventory confidence and audit readiness.
The transferable lesson: segment the tools before choosing a tag
The engineering point Xerafy draws out travels further than the deployment detail. Tool tracking is not a single tag application. Cabinet tools, shadow board tools, small metal hand tools and large open-area tools each need a different tag format, read point and validation step. Choose the tag before segmenting the tools and you end up with the wrong tag for the surface, a read zone that does not match how technicians work, or a reader estate that captures plenty of reads and converts none into usable tool status.
Further deployments of this kind are collected in our asset tracking and case studies archives.
Read more at https://xerafy.com/post/how-avianor-uses-rfid-tool-control-cabinets-cribs-portals
