Largest Sock Manufacturer in Europe Tracks Socks with RFID Solutions from STS and Alien Technology

Logistics Insight Asia - New Products, 23/6/2008

Alien Technology announced that STS, a member of Alien Technology’s Value Added Solutions Provider (VASP) channel partner network, has successfully completed a closed loop, EPC compliant tote application for GEL-AL. As a result, GEL-AL, the largest sock manufacturer in Europe, has seen a 40 percent improvement in productivity at its Istanbul manufacturing site.

Based in Turkey, GEL-AL produces over 83 million pairs of socks annually for many of the world’s best-known brand names in sportswear. Each day at the company’s plant, approximately twenty thousand sock-filled plastic totes travel throughout the various production stations. STS, a leading RFID systems integrator in Turkey, equipped each tote with an Alien high-performance UHF/EPC compliant M-tag (inlay), which has been converted into a plastic ISO card. Individual totes 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’ within the facility, with roughly thirty totes passing the various reading points at any given time.

Alien’s RFID solution has eliminated the former line-of-sight barcode solution and dedicated personnel are no longer required to oversee the traceability of the sock laden totes.
”At GEL-AL’s flagship manufacturing site in Istanbul, the entire sock production is now completely automated with RFID.” said Levent Yalcinkaya, Technopark director for STS.

STS Technology, www.sts-rfid.com
Alien Technology, www.alientechnology.com