GEL-AL, the largest sock manufacturer in Europe, reports a 40% improvement in productivity at its flagship production facility due to a new RFID tracking system. The Turkey-based sock maker, which produces over 83 million pairs of socks for sportswear companies around the world, uses a closed loop tote application created by Alien Technology’s Turkish partner STS.
Approximately 20,000 sock-filled plastic totes travel throughout the various production stations at GEL-AL’s Istanbul plant each day. STS’s solution places an Alien inlay in each tote. The inlays are pre-programmed with a unique asset code consisting of the tote ID number, the work order and the sequence number. There are twenty read points positioned around the facility, with roughly thirty totes passing the various reading points at any given time.
“Before we implemented a RFID tote tagging system, we used large sacks to transport the socks internally to the various work stations - using bar code labels on the sacks and manually scanning each tote, which was very time-consuming and not very productive,” said Aydin Dogan, GEL-AL’s IT specialist. The RFID solution replaces the line-of-sight barcode solution, and eliminates the need for dedicated personnel to manually track the sock-filled totes ![[end]](/resources/bullet/rfidnews-4.gif)
