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  - April 23, 2008 -  

RFID News: Airbus Plans Transformational RFID Roll-Out Across End-to-End Supply Chain

 
 

Three-Phased Program Comes After Successful Pilot in 2006; Finding the “Profits in Motion;" Integration Through Supplier Portal in Phase I

 
 

 

SCDigest Editorial Staff

SCDigest Says:
The aggressive plans, thought to be among the largest commitments to RFID technology by any company to date, came in part as a result of the company’s successful RFID pilot efforts in 2006.

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European aerospace giant Airbus recently announced its plans for a major, multi-year supply chain transformation that will be enabled with a broad deployment of RFID technology across dozens of supply chain processes.

“Airbus is using a collection of Auto ID technologies such as bar coding and RFID to enhance its business processes across the value chain,” Carlo Nizam, head of value-chain visibility and RFID for Airbus, told SCDigest. “The use of RFID in particular will help streamline business processes; cutting process cycle times and inventory, eliminating paperwork and reduce the cost of operations by providing real-time automated tracking of business operations across the lifecycle of the product.”

The aggressive plans, thought to be among the largest commitments to RFID technology by any company to date, came in part as a result of the company’s successful RFID pilot efforts in 2006.

“The reason for the value chain approach is that Airbus sees the value chain as “profits in motion.” These profits are not limited to any particular function but are spread all along the value chain. The same is true of costs,” Nizam added. “So we are focusing on the big picture in order to achieve big savings. A holistic and integrated approach is the key to ensure end-to-end interoperability, not just within Airbus, but within the Airbus ecosystem as a whole, and to avoid a scattershot approach and instead focus on the top priorities of our customers - both internal and external."

Three-Phased Plan

The ultimate program will play out over many years. For now, Airbus has currently defined the roll-out in three phases:

Phase I - Supply Chain Processes: Focus on supplier integration and logistics and distribution processes; RFID-enabled supplier visibility will improve shipment accuracy. 

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Phase II - Manufacturing Processes: Focuses on global transport, manufacturing and assembly operations. Goal is to improve process precision - get the right parts to the right place at the right time.

Phase III - Maintenance Processes: Track all the parts that go into the entire assembly operation of an aircraft, and automatically track and trace parts associated with a specific aircraft. Build an “electronic manifest” to speed and improve serviceability.

“Each phase represents a scope of processes,” Nizam said. “The Phase 1 pilots were conducted between January and April 2006, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. As a result, the results were then applied to multiple areas that were relevant to the release 1 processes. These areas span all the countries that Airbus operates in. Each geographic area represents a project in itself. These projects are then prioritized for deployment based on a company schedule. And, of course, each project will not go big bang, but will go through a pilot phase (meaning ramp up in this context) to stabilize the new process then expansion for completion.”

Each of these phases is a major effort, and includes a series of sub-projects across operating regions.

“Phase 1 is currently in deployment. This means we are working down the prioritized list of projects within Phase 1,” Nizam added. “The A380 aircraft Final Assembly Line in Hamburg has fully deployed the RFID enabled solution for automatic container tracking, as has the Single Aisle (A318/A319/A321) Final Assembly Line in Hamburg. We are in ramp up phase on a number of other locations in Germany and France. The total time for phase 1 covering all Airbus business operations is difficult to estimate because we are talking about all Airbus locations so it would be safe to say in the order of years.”

In parallel with the Phase 1 rollout, the pilot trials for Phase 2 are in their final stages.

Supplier Integration

In a key element of the Phase 1, Airbus will be working with suppliers to tag shipments. Suppliers can attach readers to computers that access Airbus’ web-based portal application to communicate RFID-based shipment data to Airbus, creating Advanced Ship Notices that will be used in receiving, and improving inventory visibility.

“The RFID readers under the Airbus umbrella of operations will be supplied at Airbus cost. The auto ID software platform that processes this information is at Airbus cost,” Nizam said. “The E-Supply Chain tool (which is free to our suppliers) provides all the necessary means for information exchange between our supply chain partners, the Auto ID software platform and Airbus business systems.”

When suppliers dispatch deliveries, the information is entered onto the Airbus portal, which then sends the information to the relevant Airbus business systems. When an item within Airbus operations is read by a bar code or RFID reader, the information is sent to the auto ID platform and it references the information that was transferred to it from E-Supply Chain application prior to dispatch.

The auto ID platform is from Oat Systems, in partnership with IBM. Much of the business process transformation is enabled by a suite of IBM technologies, including its WebSphere business process management platform.

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