News
Endries International, of Brillion, Wis., has more than 500 customers worldwide, stretching far beyond its birthplace in northeast Wisconsin to Europe, Mexico and Canada. Endries manages more than a half million items. Recently, Endries introduced Pulse, an automated, foolproof mechanism that instantly informs the company when a bin is empty. While Endries processes the order to replenish the empty bin, the customer obtains the same part from a second bin.
Until recently, Endries only received the “empty” notice after its service representative checked every bin at a customer’s facility, which might happen only once or twice a week. Now, with a new, high-tech solution crafted in cooperation with UW–Madison engineers, workers on the manufacturing floor simply drop the empty bin into a chute for electronic identification.
The technology for PULSE is called RFID (radio frequency identification). Unlike bar coding, no line-of-sight connection is required between the tag and the sensor.PULSE offers compounding benefits to Endries, which has grown into the fifth-largest fastener distributor in the nation.