Prysmian, the Italian-headquartered group that is the world’s largest manufacturer of energy and telecommunications cable, has installed a RAIN RFID gate at the main entrance of its production site in Emmen, in the north-east of the Netherlands. Tagged cable drums are now registered automatically as trucks drive through the checkpoint. The integrator behind the system, Aucxis, says the deployment has cut drum losses by up to 90% and shortened return cycles by 25%.
Aucxis is a Belgian RFID systems integrator based in Stekene, whose HERTZ middleware and POLARIS software sit behind its gate, tunnel and fixed-reader installations. The Emmen gate is a UHF portal of the kind widely used in logistics: an array of antennas mounted on a frame that reads every tag passing through it, with no stopping, scanning or line of sight required.
An asset that never stops moving
Hundreds of cable drums pass through the Emmen plant each day, and they are assets in their own right rather than packaging. They circulate between production, storage, transport and customer sites, and Aucxis says registering them in and out by hand was slow, error-prone and left gaps in the record of where any given drum actually was. A drum that disappears from view, sits too long at a customer or comes back late costs money twice over: in replacement stock and in the logistics effort of chasing it.
The physical conditions made it a difficult read. Drums at Emmen are built from wood, plastic and metal, the gate sits outdoors in cold and wet weather, and trucks arrive loaded in configurations nobody can predict in advance.
“The combination of Aucxis RFID gates and Alesea TraxiumLite has fundamentally improved our insight into the locations and movements of cable drums,” said Joannes Vonk, Prysmian’s business manager for power distribution and network components. “What used to be difficult to track is now a controlled process.”
Eight antennas and a weatherproof reader
Following a proof of concept, Aucxis built the gate as a steel structure carrying eight RFID antennas, positioned to cover the full cross-section of a loaded trailer. Read angles and RF tuning were adjusted for the awkward loading patterns, and an industrial Impinj reader sits in a weatherproof enclosure for continuous outdoor operation.
Behind the gate, a local HERTZ server processes tag reads in real time and pushes the data to Alesea, Prysmian’s own IoT platform for cable drum management, over secure APIs. Aucxis says the setup is ready to integrate with Prysmian’s ERP, WMS or MES systems, and that read results can be validated against weighbridge data or packing lists. The drums carry Alesea TraxiumLite tags, which also give staff an NFC read point so a drum can be identified and updated with a smartphone.
The numbers, and whose numbers they are
Aucxis reports 99% read reliability on normal passages through the gate, more than 2,300 tagged cable drums at Emmen, and savings of up to 1.5 million euros on new drum purchases on top of the 90% loss reduction and 25% faster return cycles. The company says the architecture is ready to scale to further gates and other Prysmian sites.
These are the integrator’s own published figures from its case study rather than independently audited results, and the source does not set out the baseline they are measured against. That caveat aside, the shape of the project is a familiar one for anyone running returnable transit assets: the saving comes from reuse and avoided replacement, not from labour hours. More deployments of this kind are collected in our asset tracking and logistics sections, and the terminology used above is explained in the RFID glossary.
Read more at https://rfid.aucxis.com/en/case/rfid-gate-for-automatic-cable-drum-detection-at-prysmian-emmen/
