North Sails has always taken advantage of Technology.
North was the first sailmaker to leverage computer modelling to perform structural analysis using a computer-simulated wind tunnel — which saved them time and money. They were also the first sailmaker to develop a computer controlled laser plotter/cutter to increase the efficiencies of their production floor.
North has over 150 sail lofts throughout the world. One of the busiest lofts is in Portsmouth, RI where on a given day dozens of sails will be worked on and moving around in the facility. Eric Wakefield, Service Manager, needed to develop a better system to manage his sail inventory of 600-700 sails. His team was spending too much time maintaining the physical sail inventory and couldn’t locate assets fast enough when customers needed them.
North Sails Manager, Eric Wakefield, using the A2B Tracking mobile RFID platform
North Sails RFID technology
Eric turned to RFID technology and worked with A2B Tracking to install a real-time asset management solution leveraging both fixed and mobile RFID readers. The physical inventory that previously required multiple days to complete was now able to be accomplished within 15-minutes with Mobile RFID and the A2B Tracking software platform.
Eric and his team now perform weekly floor-to-record inventories of the entire facility, saving significant labor costs and improving their inventory accuracy to 100%.
Watch this quick Overview Video to see the North Sails RFID system in action.
Find Missing Items
One of the challenges that plagued Eric and his team historically were ghost items that seemed to have legs of their own. These missing items required extra effort from the team as they dropped other projects to join the search party. More importantly, Eric was concerned that these scenarios were also tarnishing their customer relationship and he knew that they needed to stop.
The A2B Tracking Pro-Locate feature quickly became an ideal solution for North Sails which they now rely upon to find assets every day. Using a mobile smartphone and the Zebra RFD8500 reader the user can search for a specific asset while walking the facility. As the reader gets within range of the asset tag the proximity location software app developed by A2B Tracking emits a series of beeps which get faster and louder the closer to the asset. This is also graphically represented on the handheld screen which all helps lead the user directly to the missing asset. North Sails has reduced their search time from many hours down to a few minutes and sometimes seconds with Pro-Locate.
Here is a quick video to demonstrate the Pro-Locate feature.
