Each week I publish an email that offers stories about the precast industry or personal anecdotes that relate to my passion for continual improvement. This week's subject line was: Precast, John Deere & The Family Farm. It recounted my very positive impressions of both Deere and a nationally recognized farm for the importance they place on data collection and analysis to sustain continued productivity growth.

So, perhaps its fitting that I just came across an article in Planet Lean entitled Lean Maintenance in Agriculture. As you might guess, there are some good lessons for the precast community in observing how leading farms are applying lean manufacturing principals to maintenance practices.

Transcript:

Hi. Welcome back to the Idencia Innovation Vlog Series. I’m Jillian. And this week we’re going to be talking about different types of innovation.

We don't usually promote our products or services in the lede of our blog posts, but we are so excited about our new Idencia 101 program that today is the exception. On January 7, 2019, the first group of precasters will start this guided, self-managed program that will leave them skilled in implementing their plants with RFID tracking. They will be heroes for saving money by reducing paper, enhancing inventory management and expediting shipping documentation!

We've received some great questions about the program so we thought we would address them in this post.

Sometimes the notion of implementing an RFID tracking system can seem more difficult than it really is. Naturally, anything new and different looms much larger in the mind than in practice. Transitioning from paper to digital records is no exception. We've drawn on our collective experience in helping customers implement the Idencia concrete tracking system to offer tips gleaned from best practices we have seen and encouraged.

We really enjoy learning how our customers make best use of concrete product tracking for their plants. Since the practice is relatively new, by definition our customers are forward- thinking. So there is a lot to learn from how they improve their productivity. We learn from them and pass it on to the rest of the industry. Here are three of the most popular applications.

RFID systems are becoming more and more prevalent. We drive through tolls and the RFID tag in our car is automatically read and we are charged. Tags are included on items in stores to deter shoplifting. Hospital equipment is tagged so that supplies can be tracked. And, of course, infrastructure products are being tagged at manufacture so that critical QC/QA information can be tracked throughout the product's life cycle. They are everywhere but... how does it actually work?

Over the past two and a half years about 80 precast and prestressed concrete manufacturers have subscribed to the Idencia concrete tracking system to improve inventory control and implement paperless QC processes. As they have integrated Idencia into their operations, they have developed some great ideas for improvements based on their user experiences. We welcome this input because our customers often come up with suggestions that may never have occurred to us. Every once in a while we like to report the new features that have been developed from these ideas.

Having spoken to a number of producers at The Precast Show earlier this month, we got a good chance to learn what the industry wants from technology. We are impressed by how much is understood about the potential for using an RFID tracking system to remove paper from QC practices and create a real-time inventory management system. There were a lot of great questions asked about how it works, so we thought we would address the most common questions here.

This past week we took a tour of new customers to introduce the Idencia system and discuss ways we can help them with their precast productivity. We always ask about the things that aggravate them most in managing their operations so that we can continue to improve upon Idencia in ways that solve real operating problems. Their answers were remarkably consistent and all indicated that their frustrations are growing as they get busier. Here are the top four.