Sept/Oct 2003

Tracking kegs with RFID tags is proving a real money-saver for the brewing industry, and Trenstar seems well on the way to cornering the market

As any logistics manager will confirm, keeping track of any mobile asset is difficult. If you have over a million of these assets and over 60,000 possible locations it becomes the stuff of nightmares. Yet that scenario is exactly what logistics managers at large breweries have to face every day.

The assets in question are the metal beer kegs and the locations are the pubs, hotels and restaurants they are despatched to and, when empty, collected from. There is a constant cycle of full kegs going out and empty ones coming back, and the larger brewers need hundreds of thousands of the £40 kegs to ensure the supply chain runs smoothly.

Keeping track of them is crucial in controlling costs, but annual losses of £6million are not uncommon for large brewers. This, anyway, is the estimate of Trenstar, a company which has established a keg-management business in the UK using RFID (radio frequency identification) tracking technology.

 

Trenstar is the product of a merger of South African-based Trencor, a specialist in returnable packaging for automotive components, and Microstar Logistics, which developed a pay-per-use keg pool for US micro-breweries. In 2001 Trenstar acquired UK-based RFID specialist KPT, which has since taken on the group's corporate identity.

Trenstar buys the kegs from the breweries, who then pay for them on a per-fill basis. Trenstar manages the supply and return of the kegs, tracking them throughout the supply chain using RFID tags fitted to each keg.

The passive tag is secured inside the top rim of the barrel and encased in a special plastic holder which helps protect it from loading damage - and also, by acting as a barrier between the RFID and the metal keg, insulates it from frequency interference. The kegs have a predicted life of five to ten years and the tags five years.

Trenstar has been managing 1.9 million kegs for Scottish Courage since April 2002, and added 1.1 million barrels from Carlsberg Tetley this summer. It hopes to clinch an agreement with a third brewer this autumn, which will make it responsible for 4 million kegs in the UK - equivalent to 60 to 70 per cent of all UK kegs.

Keg sharing

UK breweries do not currently share their kegs, but Stuart Facey, general manager of Trenstar in this country, thinks that will come in time. "What matters is what comes out of the pump, not what name is on the barrel or the delivery dray."

The Carlsberg Tetley operation encompasses 16 depots, two brewery sites and 379 dray vehicles delivering into 60,000 pubs, as well as to hotels and restaurants.

RFID aerials at the end of the keg-filling line read the barrel contents and quantity. The dray vehicles all have Symbol handheld data readers. The barrels are scanned on to the vehicles, and again at the delivery point. The dray may also be delivering crates of bottled beers and gas canisters, so the Symbol devices can read both barcodes and RFID codes. The drays also collect empty barrels, and these too are scanned on to the vehicle and again when they enter the depot.

The empty barrels are returned to a holding area prior to washing and refilling.

Trenstar receives Carlsberg Tetley production forecast data so that it can ensure the right number of barrels of the correct size appear on the filling line at the right time.

Each of the RFID tags can hold up to 40K of data. Stored information includes the tag ID, maintenance records, container type, date last filled, neck type and product. The date-last-filled field is important because if more than 26 weeks have passed since a keg was filled, it must have a double wash before being refilled.

Data on the kegs is accessible via a Web link and is fed into the brewery's ERP system. "We can give managers a complete picture of what happens to the barrel at key points in the supply chain."

Facey believes one benefit will be fewer kegs in the system. "There are a tremendous number of spare kegs floating around in the system currently because managers cannot predict accurately how many will be returned at a given time, and whether brewers will have enough kegs to handle production forecasts, especially in peak periods."