PS Vidyalakshmi

CHENNAI: Commercial vehicle major Ashok Leyland (AL) is planning to deploy RFID technology within its assembling centers. Speaking about the new initiative, AL information management services special director N Mohanakrishnan said, “RFID technology would couple with Barcode technology, which was implemented last year, to select right set of engine parts with the help of RFID tags.”

AL has around 65-70 different models of engines and at least 25-30 models are manufactured every week. “The RFID tags would help the technicians pick the right set of engine parts for each model with the help of this technology,” Mohanakrishnan said.

“Unlike the retail segment, the use of RFID technology would be different in the manufacturing segment. The RFID tags set to particular parts would contain information such as time of fitment, batch number, test information and others,” he added.

The RFID tags are also expected to help the vendors and dealers to resolve issues in case of any failures of the engine parts. “New vehicles coming out of the production line to be transported to various vendors and dealers would carry RFID tags with it. The tags would help the vendors and dealers identify and rectify the engine issues and replacing parts, depending on the model of the engine,” he added.

The company is planning to deploy RFID within all manufacturing units in the next one yea. AL has been using the barcode technology since 2004 in three areas; assembling area, cabling of Leyland parts and 'Mitri,' a program announced for the vendors/dealers.

The company has invested around Rs 80 crore so far on IT initiatives and would be investing additional Rs 80 crore in the next three years. It is to be noted that AL is the first company in the automotive sector to receive BS 7799 certification for its Information Security Management System (ISMS), recently.

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