ThyssenKrupp Steel will use RFID at its new steel mill in the Bay of Sepetiba, Brazil, which is scheduled to start production of 5 million metric tons of steel per year in 2009. It will also use RFID at its sea harbor in Duisburg, Germany, to identify steel slabs automatically and to speed up the unloading process.

The company needed an automated identification system to identify more than 100,000 steel slabs because of the tight unloading times when clearing sea vessels from their cargo, explained ThussenKrupp Steel’s head of its Competence Center for RFID Loic Feinbier. There is a window of less than three minutes per slab when clearing cargo that must be maintained at all times. Any delay would likely create additional cost.

Barcode and other optical recognition technologies were unusable because of all the uncontrollable environmental and transport conditions along the supply chain, Feinbier said. That includes sunlight, darkness, mist, rain, snow, ice, dirt, seawater and physical impact, for example.

The company, with the help of its consultant Accenture, choose RFID to overcome these barriers. But even by RFID standards, this was a challenging project.

Before the project began, the company did a detailed ROI calculation and decided to move forward. It is also critical to understand that using RFID technology in this case is not about streamlining an existing process, but rather about designing an entirely new process from ground up in the best possible way, Feinbier said. The company’s new steel mill was an opportunity to do just that.

ThyssenKrupp Steel and Accenture chose a mix of RFID vendors for their best-in-breed products. PsionTeklogix handheld RFID readers were chosen because they had a compact design, were rugged and the manufacturer was able to custom-design RFID antennae, Feinbier said. The company went with Alien Technology fixed RFID readers and antennae because they were a recognized leader in EPC Class 1 Gen 2 compliant reading devices, according to Feinbier.

Part of the challenge was finding RFID technology to enable secure steel slab identification within the requirements of the company’s internal process. Sato was chosen as printer and label vendor because it was the only company on the RFID market today that offered a so called Flag-tag, which comprises an RFID tag and a corresponding RFID printer – critical to making RFID suitable for use on steel slabs, Feinbier said.

On the IT side, the company chose Sybase iAnywhere’s RFID Anywhere middleware as an abstraction layer to shield the diverse RFID hardware devices, he said. The middleware made integration with ThyssenKrupp Steel’s existing enterprise systems straightforward, he said.

And iAnywhere’s mobile device management features also were attractive, he said. Choosing this layer is of particular importance for it may also become the basis for future RFID solutions to come, Feinbier added.

ThyssenKrupp Steel did consider other options – particularly in the tag, printer and middleware areas. But the vendors chosen came out on top in terms of what ThyssenKrupp Steel needed for slab identification, Feinbier said.

The key takeaway for the company was choosing RFID vendors that would work hand-in-hand with them and jointly adapt their projects to the specific context of the project, he said. Any vendor too inflexible to do so could endanger the entire project.

Indeed, the steelmaker asked both iAnywhere and Sato to add features in their products just for ThyssenKrupp’s slab identification project. They did and Feinbier said this flexibility has been important to the success of the project.

The RFID project is running in five parts. The first four were a technical proof of concept phase, a business case phase, and a two-phase pilot, which took a good 10 months.

The final rollout phase is scheduled to begin no later than end of 2008. Staff training has not yet begun, but Feinbier said he expects training would be minimal.

The success of the project so far has been judged, in part, by the read rates of RFID tags at all critical points along the future transport chain, Feinbier said.

Even though read rates were below 100% – and had never been expected to be 100% in the first place – the results were highly satisfactory and confirmed the business case, he said. As such, ThyssenKrupp plans to use RFID elsewhere in its business, Feinbier said. RFID would help the company streamline its internal and external business processes with partners in the steel industry, he said.