Butcher’s knives under RFID control
Cleanliness and hygiene are imperative in the food industry. This does not just apply to the products themselves; it involves the entire work environment. The knife manufacturing company, Friedr. Dick (Deizisau, Germany) builds RFID transponders directly into its butcher’s tools and thus facilitates automated control and checking of all work steps.
Day in, day out tools such as knives and sharpening steels are used in the meat-processing industry as well as protective clothing for processing food. In compliance with the relevant directives and ordinances special requirements apply regarding traceability and hygiene.
However, in practice it is often difficult to reliably control adherence to the rules. The reason: as a rule documentation is done manually and it is correspondingly prone to errors and complicated. Radio frequency identification, abbreviated RFID, could be the remedy. It makes it possible to unambiguously assign employees to their tools and also enables the automatically controlled capture of the data in all process steps.
In cooperation with the Tönnies Lebensmittel GmbH, a leading company in the meat-processing industry, knife manufacturer Friedr. Dick has performed the practical testing. In the Prozeus project sponsered by the Federal Ministry of Economics until the end of 2012, the cross-company process chain was designed to be distinctly more transparent based on the GS1 standards. The core of the measures: at Friedr. Dick RFID transponders are already incorporated directly into the handle of the knife during production. The transponders bear the electronic product code (EPC) which facilitates automatic identification of the tools at central collection points. Thanks to serialisation of the code correct use of each individual knife can be traced and documented reliably throughout the service life of the product. The knives are “linked” to the respective user via the EPC; manipulation is impossible. It is therefore possible to reconstruct who used which tool in which work steps at any juncture. The tools issued and used in the work area can also be monitored and documented during and after the end of the work process.
Horst Löhnert, Managing Director of Friedr. Dick, is convinced that “the electronic networking with important key customers will be a crucial component when it comes to reinforcing the company’s competitiveness.” In the long term the company plans to extend the RFID technology to further processes and application systems and thus to fully and specifically exploit further potential for improvements.
The results of the project have now been published in a free brochure. The brochure can be ordered from Prozeus or be downloaded at www.prozeus.de.