Suntory Products has cut the spare parts stocktake at its Tennensui Kita Alps Shinano no Mori factory from about 57 hours of work by a team of 20 down to roughly two hours for one person, after putting RFID labels on around 24,000 equipment spare part items. SATO, which supplied the system, puts the saving in man hours at 95%; the engineer who runs the count says more than 95%.
Suntory Products makes the group’s soft drinks and mineral water, and the Tennensui Kita Alps Shinano no Mori factory, one of its natural water plants, was the lead site for the deployment. SATO Corporation is the Japanese auto-ID manufacturer known for label printers, barcode hardware and RFID, and ASETRA is its packaged RFID asset management product. The case study is published in Japanese, so the remarks below are translated.
A maintenance system that still relied on eyes and keyboards
The starting point was not a paper process. In 2021, as part of a wider smart factory programme, Suntory introduced a CMMS at the factory. A computerised maintenance management system holds equipment records, maintenance history and the parts needed to keep machinery running, and this one brought roughly 24,000 spare part items into a single place.
What it did not change was how stock was actually counted. Takeshi Shibuya, Deputy Section Chief in the Information Systems Department of Suntory Holdings’ Digital Division, said stock management remained a matter of looking at shelves and typing numbers in by hand. Human error was frequent, and the figures in the system drifted away from what was physically there. A full stocktake took 20 people and about 57 hours, a heavy load on the site.
It was person-dependent work too. Only the owner of an area knew how their part of the count was done, to the point where colleagues would telephone the responsible person while they were away on holiday to ask.
ASETRA chosen from about ten candidates
Aiko Nakagawa, also of the Information Systems Department at Suntory Holdings, said the team focused on RFID in response to those problems and looked at around ten candidate suppliers before settling on ASETRA. The deciding factor was not tag performance but ease of linkage with the CMMS they already had: reading a tag writes the goods in, goods out and stocktake records straight into it, with no second set of numbers to reconcile. A test deployment met expectations.
Nakagawa also credited SATO’s coaching for the confidence to go ahead. The vendor advised not only on operating procedure after go live, but on how to apply labels according to the shape of each part and the way it was stored, and on how to position items in storage.
What the system looks like in use
Master data is registered in ASETRA, RFID labels are issued, the labels go onto the spare parts, and the tagged parts are put into storage. Handheld RFID readers do the reading. SATO’s product information describes ASETRA more broadly as reader and writer units, RFID label printers and handheld terminals, with an optional desktop unit, an optional RFID gate and CSV based integration with core systems.
Neither the case study nor SATO’s ASETRA product page states the frequency band or the air interface, so anyone sizing up a comparable project should ask rather than assume: the answer changes read range, tag cost and how metal parts behave. The RFID News glossary sets out what separates the bands.
Suntory also tidied up where and how spare parts were placed, partly to improve read accuracy. That produced a benefit the project was not bought for: people other than the area owner could now find where things were kept.
The count, and what the accuracy unlocked
Koyo Fukuda, at the Tennensui Kita Alps Shinano no Mori factory, said the effect was felt immediately. The 20 people and 57 hours became one person and about two hours, a cut in man hours he puts at more than 95%. Human error from visual checking and manual entry was eliminated, and the gap between system stock and actual stock became very small. The reader is simple enough, Fukuda said, that anyone can learn it in one or two sessions, which is what removed the dependency on a single person.
Yutaro Matsusaka, of the factory’s Engineering Department, pointed to a second order gain. Suntory factories lend and borrow spare parts from one another, and with stock visible in real time that can now be done against a figure both sides can trust. Better accuracy also makes the right holding easier to judge: the site used to carry more spare stock than it needed, and now buys only what it needs while watching the numbers. Over-holding ties up cash, which is why inventory accuracy keeps surfacing in asset tracking projects sold on labour savings.
Beyond spare parts
Shibuya said the factory is being treated as a foothold. Rollout to other factories is under consideration, and further out he would like to manage assets beyond spare parts, naming pallet and beer keg traceability, and to link the ordering system to inventory management. Returnable items of that kind are among the steadiest applications in the RFID case study record.
Read more at https://www.sato.co.jp/case/suntory.html
