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Success Story
Toyota Material Handling Uses Zebra MotionWorks Enterprise to Track and Streamline Product Movements in Real Time
Toyota Material Handling is responsible for producing 180 industrial trucks every day, and products can easily be misplaced among the whirlwind of moving pieces. It worked with Zebra to come up with a real-time location solution that would reliably work in its industrial manufacturing facilities so it could automatically monitor and analyze product movements. Employees can now identify abnormal excursions and take corrective action quickly, a necessity as the company moves toward "smart factory" automation.
Zebra Success Story: Toyota Material Handling
Overview: Manufacturing Challenge
Toyota Material Handling needed to ensure products flowed from Point A to Point Z without disruption or delay to meet production quotas and customer demands. With the right ultra wideband (UWB) and radio frequency identification (RFID) solution deployed throughout its facilities, it would be able to gain a holistic, real-time view of its facilities and product flows.
Benefits / Outcomes
- Automated Analysis of Product Flow Disruptions
- Increased Employee Productivity
- Streamlined Workflows
- Enhanced Customer Service
Customer
Toyota Material Handling
United States
Industry
Manufacturing
Solutions
Zebra MotionWorks Enterprise
Zebra Ultra Wideband Tags
Zebra RFID Sensors
About Toyota Material Handling
A large-scale industrial equipment manufacturing plant is a challenging environment for a real-time location solution. Along the facility’s many conveyor lines and assembly stations, dense metallic steel is formed, pressed, drilled, laser-cut and spot welded by heavy machinery. Each process is done simultaneously, which generates high decibels of noise that can disrupt the signals and flight times of the solution’s ultra wideband (UWB) sensors and tags. The loud environment poses a series of technical hurdles making it difficult to leverage real-time location technology.
The Challenge
Toyota Material Handling faced that exact challenge when it partnered with Zebra to integrate MotionWorks Enterprise within a quarter of its 1.3 million square-foot manufacturing plant. The company sought to build the foundation for a “smart factory” that would drive its just-in-time delivery to customers by increasing product visibility and streamlining workflows. This section of the facility is responsible for producing 180 industrial trucks per-day, so products are susceptible to misplacement amidst the whirlwind of daily operations. The solution needed to fully integrate with Toyota Material Handling’s existing technology infrastructure to allow the company to quickly alleviate disruptions and delays by monitoring – and ultimately enhancing – response times on a second-by-second basis. The end-goal was to ensure products flowed from Point A to Point Z with complete transparency so the company could provide excellent customer service synonymous with the Toyota Production System core value of Jidoka – the Japanese term for “built-in quality.”
Zebra's experience in the manufacturing space helped guide us through technical hurdles within our facility. By hosting their team on-site at our facility, we worked together to solve challenges and put planning to action. It was a no-brainer to make an investment with Zebra.
The Solution
Another Toyota Production System core value is Genchi Genbutsu, a Japanese problem-solving concept that translates to “real location, real thing” and “go and see.” In the spirit of Genchi Genbutsu, Toyota Material Handling began the strategic process by hosting Zebra’s team of engineers for an on-site consultation at its facility. Through the MotionWorks Enterprise Discovery Workshop, Zebra and Toyota Material Handling identified the foundation of the company’s needs to ensure the solution infrastructure and UWB sensors and tags were optimized for the use-case. Over a three-week span, Zebra and Toyota Material Handling worked side-by-side to assess the facility’s programmable logic controllers and line conveyors, troubleshoot technical challenges, and develop a design blueprint for how MotionWorks Enterprise would generate a holistic view of the facility, as well as the precise locations of the sensors and tags. In adhering to each step of the process without cutting corners, Zebra and Toyota Material Handling were able to solve installation challenges to ensure performance goals could be met.
Zebra and Toyota Material Handling seamlessly installed the MotionWorks Enterprise infrastructure without disruption, leveraging existing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create order number associations and product statuses. More than 400 UWB tags were deployed to manually operated forklifts, and 60 RFID sensors were meticulously placed in predefined areas that minimized the possibility of obstructions. In the event of an abnormal excursion, employees would scan the forklift’s UWB tag with a Zebra handheld mobile scanner to access reports and graphs of its previous movement data, which revealed actionable insights on the location and cause of the excursion. Then, employees could use those insights to take corrective action and prevent future disruptions.
The Zebra Difference: Outcome and Benefits
After a flawless consultation, design and implementation process, it became apparent that the partnership between Zebra and Toyota Material Handling was a perfect fit. For eight months, Toyota Material Handling has utilized the real-time product flow visibility provided by MotionWorks Enterprise to make continuous improvements to maximize efficiency and customer service quality. The company was already using Zebra’s mobile scanners, so employees were previously familiar with these tools. The only added task was attaching and detaching the tags on each forklift, which approximated to four seconds per-associate. By automating root-cause analysis of workflow disruptions, MotionWorks Enterprise empowers Toyota Material Handling’s staff to focus on more high-level responsibilities.
The company’s long-term vision includes expanding its use of MotionWorks Enterprise for production, parts delivery and distribution to optimize the tracking and tracing of its entire value stream. The expansion will enable Toyota Material Handling to perform detailed location monitoring that ensures every product moves efficiently from the initial manufacturing stage to the last mile of just-in-time delivery.
