Xterprise 12-month study reveals poor data capture wastes reusable assets

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Published : 20 Nov 2006 14:15

Dallas, TX – November 17, 2006 − Xterprise Incorporated, a leading global provider of RFID-enabled supply chain solutions, announced today it has completed a twelve-month evaluation of the Reusable Transport Item (RTI) market that identifies the two most important issues in asset management today as the lack of good data capture processes and the deficiency of management systems for reusable assets in supply chains.

The worldwide EPCglobal standards body defines RTIs “any item that is used as part of the manufacturing and/or product distribution process or service delivery process but not the end product itself.” Most notable examples of RTIs are pallets, totes, vats, bins and chemical transport containers. Xterprise is a member of the EPCglobal Reusable Transport Item (RTI) work group (www.epcGlobal.org).

Xterprise studied and evaluated RTI best business practices and technology trends in multiple customer

environments across four major supply-chain market segments, including food and produce processing,

hard goods manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, and petrochemical distribution. The analysis

primarily focused on North America and Europe.

Excluded from the study were containers transported by sea and air. The Xterprise study primarily looked

into two common use cases: “Closed-Loop” (assets that do not leave a company or remained in a

closed-community control) and ‘Pooled” (assets that are shared among a large number of like-companies

and are controlled by the owner of the assets, who is not a user).

The results highlighted that fundamental management and measurement systems are missing inside the enterprise and are costing enterprises millions of dollars in poor utilization practices. Xterprise found that even though there are millions of dollars spent every year on RTIs in supply chains, asset management, data and collection today is largely conducted by error-prone

manual processes, if at all. Information systems were often in place to manage product-manufacturing processes measuring to the finest detail, only to have profit margins for those products eroded by poor RTI asset utilization in those

same supply chains. These assets can range from ten-dollar plastic totes to multi-thousand dollar transport containers.

In one case, a company built into their operations budget approximately $100,000 per quarter to purchase disposable containers because their multi-facility asset utilization process was so inefficient that asset fleet replenishment rarely occurred in a timely fashion to support product production. As with this example, Xterprise found that a common practice was to bury these costs in operations further creating a “that’s just how we do it” mentality and needlessly increasing costs.

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