Industrial and automotive plants run on visibility: knowing where each job, fixture and asset is, without stopping the line to count. Identium has supplied RFID hardware and systems to industrial and automotive clients in India — a base that includes names such as Suzuki and HCL — to support work-in-progress, asset and tool tracking on the shop floor.
The challenge
On a production floor, work moves faster than clipboards and barcode scans can keep up with. Teams lose time searching for bins, fixtures and tools; work orders fall out of sync with the system; and there is no reliable record of how long a job waited at each stage. Many carriers are metal and pass through heat, paint and rough handling that ordinary labels do not survive.
What Identium deployed
Identium’s deployments for industrial clients are built from proven, India-band hardware rather than one-off prototypes:
- Industrial UHF tags on carriers — bins, totes, pallets, fixtures and job travellers carry rugged RFID tags and on-metal tags that survive heat and harsh handling.
- Fixed readers at process stages automatically record arrivals and departures, so the ERP or MES always knows where each work order is — see fixed UHF readers.
- Handheld readers for searches, audits and exception handling — see portable UHF readers.
The work draws on Identium’s manufacturing and WIP tracking, RFID for automotive, RFID asset tracking and RFID tool tracking solutions. Hardware operates on India’s 865-868 MHz UHF band, and Identium is BIS certified and WPC approved.
The outcome
Replacing manual rounds with automatic RFID reads gives production teams live visibility of jobs and assets, fewer misplaced bins and tools, and an accurate trail of where work has been — useful for both routing and quality audits. Staff spend less time hunting for items and more time on value-adding work. These outcomes are described qualitatively; we do not publish hard percentage figures for individual client deployments.
The engineering behind a line-side read point
In deployments of this kind the band is settled first, because readers, antennas and tags are all supplied in band-specific versions and the bill of materials follows from it. Shop-floor WIP and asset tracking is passive UHF work — EPC Gen2, formally ISO/IEC 18000-63 and marketed as RAIN RFID — and in India that means 865–868 MHz, notified under G.S.R. 853(E) of 10 December 2021 in supersession of the 2005 rules that had set 865–867 MHz. Equipment type-approved under those earlier rules stays valid for its service life, which is why plant already running, and many datasheets still in circulation, quote the narrower figure. Verify the current position with WPC before either number goes into a purchase specification; our BIS and WPC compliance guide gives the background. ETSI Europe uses the same band, so the regional trap is the United States, where the FCC allocation sits near 902–928 MHz — which matters if tagged carriers or parts travel to an overseas plant, or if hardware is bought without an Indian approval.
Inside that allocation, Table IV of the 2021 rules permits 2 W e.r.p. only in four 200 kHz channels, centred at 865.7, 866.3, 866.9 and 867.5 MHz, and caps continuous transmission on any one channel at four seconds, with at least 100 ms before the next burst. Two consequences for a plant. Read points within radio sight of each other are competing for four channels, so a dense row of stations can lose reads to its neighbours rather than to anything wrong with the tags — that contention is what a reader’s dense-reader mode exists to manage, so ask what the specific model provides. Separately, a carrier turning up in the wrong station’s record is almost always read-zone overlap rather than a channel problem, and the fix there is antenna pattern, power and aim — which is why station layout belongs on the drawing before the cabling goes in, not after.
The physical install decides as much as the radio does. The tag’s reply is specified at around −20 dBm e.r.p., tiny before the environment takes its cut, so every decibel of cable loss is paid twice — once on the reader’s transmit and again on that weak return — and a reader sited in a distant control panel instead of near its antennas quietly costs range. Welders, variable-frequency drives and contactors raise the local noise floor, which typically argues for separated cable routing and a properly bonded earth. Antennas at floor level need brackets or bollards against forklift and trolley strikes, and a reader working in coolant mist or grinding dust belongs in a rated enclosure. A read also only tells you a carrier was present, not which way it went: direction and sequence come from pairing antennas, or from a position signal the line already produces.
Settle these before ordering:
- The acceptance test — read rate measured on your own carriers, at your line speed, at one agreed chokepoint, and settled in writing before the order rather than argued about after it.
- The carrier census — how many bins, trolleys and fixtures actually exist, and whose job it is to re-tag one when it is rebuilt or scrapped.
- The manual exception path for a carrier that will not read, so an unread carrier does not stop the line.
- Which record is authoritative — the RFID read or the existing job traveller — while both run in parallel.
Related reading
- UHF RFID antenna gain, polarisation and placement
- Field troubleshooting when an RFID tag will not read
- Ten RFID implementation mistakes worth avoiding
Planning line-side or asset RFID for your plant? Request a quote and our team will test tags on your actual carriers before you commit.
Deployment details shared with client permission; specifics available on request.