Troy Design & Manufacturing Company Builds RFID Technology with the Help of Motorola

By CIOReview | Wednesday, July 30, 2014

FREMONT, CA: Troy Design and Manufacturing Company (TDM), a Ford Motor Company subsidiary, are working together with Motorola Solutions, to build an automated RFID tracking system to monitor and guide each step of its new Chicago Modification Center where more than 150 daily vehicle conversions takes place.

“TDM is on the cutting edge of innovation with its implementation of RFID. Lowry Solutions and Motorola worked closely with TDM to develop this custom RFID solution, where operators can direct vehicles through production cells with real-time guidance solely from automated RFID scans,” says Mike Lowry, president and CEO, Lowry Solutions.

Using Motorola FX9500 fixed RFID readers and AN200 RFID antennas integrated with Lowry Solutions work-in-process (WIP) manufacturing software, TDM’s “hands-off” RFID solution tracks vehicles the moment they enter their cells. Plant floor operations are much more fluid with reliable automated data capture, which has provided further insights into the facility’s conversion capabilities. As a result, TDM has set a higher standard for facility efficiency and benefitted from more precise real-time visibility, data collection and consistency.

“With Motorola Solutions’ RFID technologies, we are able to see where vehicles are during the modification process inside and outside of our facility, which provides us with a higher level of efficiency than anticipated”, says Chris Morgan, IT manager, Troy Design & Manufacturing Company. “Based on data capture and the information in our system, traffic flow decisions are made automatically in real time. We’d like to add RFID to even more of our workstations to increase visibility across all of our vehicle conversions.”