 Rush technology in action. |
An industrial systems integration and business process consulting firm has bolstered its offering for the forklift industry.
Rush Tracking Systems has added an optical positioning solution (OPS) for speed, direction and location information for its VisiblEdge radio-frequency-identification (RFID) forklift truck packages.
The firm displayed VisiblEdge RFID-enabled forklifts with OPS capability in its booth at the RFID Journal's Live 2009 trade event this week in Orlando, Florida.
"We have been working with several customers on OPS, but the primary client is Monsanto," says Chuck Thompson, vice president of sales with Lenexa-based Rush. Agricultural industry giant Monsanto Co of St Louis, Missouri provides farmers with seeds, biotechnology trait products and herbicides.
"We are proposing the OPS for at least six clients right now," Thompson notes. "All are manufacturers with the industries being machinery, agribusiness, pharmaceutical, paper, and food and beverage. The use cases are automated receiving, (work in process) tracking, automated shipping, inventory management (and) container management. We have tested the solution both in our lab as well as on site at Monsanto."
Rush Tracking Systems has invested more than USD600,000 in developing and refining the VisiblEdge solution over three years, and "some of our 'people' on the team have been working on the lift truck solution for over six years," Thompson says. "We have been exploring OPS for about six months (and) we feel (its) flexibility and value will make it our best seller."
Rush will continue to offer floor RFID tags as the correct solution in some cases.
The firm began deploying VisiblEdge in mid-2007 and, as of October 2008, had sold 50 packages into five different end-uses
(Forkliftaction.com News #381).
In recent months, the Rush team has focused on locking down the reliability of the data collection, building out the integration to RFID middleware and back-end ERP systems and perfecting the integration to the OPS.
"Shortly, we expect to be able to offer to our customers additional value-added fleet management functionality such as run-time data, utilisation data (loaded, unloaded, idle time on time etc), collision alarms (and) route optimisation," Thompson notes.