Alpha Baking Pilots Asset Tracking With Kennedy Group & ORBIS Corp.

CHICAGO, Ill. — Alpha Bak­ing, a national dis­trib­u­tor of fresh and frozen breads, rolls and buns with four plants and mul­ti­ple depots across the United States, is test­ing a fully inte­grated asset track­ing solu­tion to deter­mine its effec­tive­ness in reduc­ing bak­ery tray loss. Prior to the pilot, Alpha Bak­ing, based in Chicago, expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant tray loss each year, with no vis­i­bil­ity to where the loss was occur­ring. It part­nered with The Kennedy Group and ORBIS Cor­po­ra­tion to con­duct a 9-month pilot using radio-frequency iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tag (RFID) tech­nol­ogy to track trays and deter­mine areas of tray loss within their sup­ply chain.

The first phase of the pilot involved tag­ging and track­ing a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant sam­pling of trays as they moved from Alpha Baking’s pro­duc­tion plants to its indi­vid­ual ship points. “As an indus­try, we are try­ing to solve a prob­lem we can’t define, “ explained Bob McGuire, vice-president and direc­tor of logis­tics for Alpha Bak­ing and chair­man of the Amer­i­can Bak­ing Asso­ci­a­tion Fleet and Dis­tri­b­u­tion Com­mit­tee. “We know as an indus­try that we are all expe­ri­enc­ing a great deal of tray loss, but until now, we have been unable to mea­sure and under­stand those losses. The use of RFID has quan­ti­fied and defined the root of the problem(s) and helped us take cor­rec­tive action to bet­ter con­trol and uti­lize our bak­ery trays at Alpha Bak­ing.”

Using bak­ery trays sup­plied by ORBIS, the RFID sys­tem is pow­ered by ePReusable™, The Kennedy Group’s reusable asset track­ing appli­ca­tion. The Kennedy Group sup­plied the RFID tags, installed the por­tals and cre­ated the read points for a real­is­tic end-to-end expe­ri­ence. ePReusable allows Alpha Baking’s logis­tics team to gen­er­ate reports with tray des­ti­na­tion points, trip dura­tion time and the aver­age turn dura­tion per des­ti­na­tion.

“The Kennedy Group has iden­ti­fied an unful­filled and press­ing need in the bak­ery indus­try,” explained Patrick Kennedy, vice-president of mar­ket­ing and sales for The Kennedy Group, an RFID solu­tion provider, offer­ing asset man­age­ment soft­ware, tags, hard­ware, and pro­fes­sional ser­vices. “We have taken the time to under­stand the unique nuances of this com­plex indus­try issue and cre­ated a scal­able, end-to-end solu­tion that gives bak­eries vis­i­bil­ity of their trays through­out the bak­ery sup­ply chain. And, since RFID requires no line of sight, trays can be tracked through­out the sys­tem, with­out any man­ual inter­ven­tion or inter­rup­tion in nor­mal busi­ness activ­i­ties.”

ePReusable™ gave Alpha Bak­ing vis­i­bil­ity to assets in its sys­tem, while enabling it to see loss pat­terns, develop cor­rec­tive actions and imple­ment new processes to mit­i­gate tray loss and bet­ter uti­lize their exist­ing trays in the future.

Accord­ing to Bob Klimko, direc­tor of retail sup­ply chain mar­ket­ing for ORBIS Cor­po­ra­tion, a lead­ing man­u­fac­turer of plas­tic reusable trays, dol­lies and pal­lets for the bak­ery indus­try, “We are very excited about the ben­e­fits our bak­ery cus­tomers can expe­ri­ence with asset track­ing. This pilot, con­ducted with our long stand­ing part­ner, Alpha Bak­ing, proved that tag­ging and track­ing trays is effec­tive in help­ing these com­pa­nies bet­ter uti­lize their reusable assets, result­ing in more turns and improv­ing their abil­ity to real­lo­cate assets when and where they are needed.”

Alpha Bak­ing has made reduc­ing tray loss a company-wide pri­or­ity and employ­ees and sup­ply chain part­ners have col­lab­o­rated to effec­tively man­age Alpha Baking’s fleet of bak­ery trays. Accord­ing to McGuire, “This first phase is pro­vid­ing account­abil­ity rel­a­tive to where trays are being lost or delayed in the sup­ply chain, and we are now able to iden­tify the ship-to loca­tions that are not in com­pli­ance. We quickly real­ized that 20 per­cent of the non-compliant ship-to loca­tions accounted for 80 per­cent of the tray issues and we are now able to cre­ate processes for greater con­trol. Peo­ple watch what we watch. If the ship-to loca­tions know we are watch­ing the bak­ery trays, then they will too.”

This first phase sig­ni­fies the first pilot of its kind that proves the effec­tive­ness and scal­a­bil­ity of an asset track­ing sys­tem for the bak­ery indus­try. Future phases may include expand­ing the num­ber of trays being tagged, as well as track­ing trays at the depot and route lev­els.
About Alpha Bak­ing

Founded in 1979, Alpha Bak­ing has grown to become one of the largest spe­cialty bak­eries in the coun­try. With over 1,000 employ­ees, Alpha Bak­ing Com­pany dis­trib­utes fresh and frozen breads across the United States. Alpha’s four bak­eries, ded­i­cated pri­vate freezer and 15 dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters serve the direct store deliv­ery (DSD), retail, food­ser­vice, insti­tu­tional, restau­rant and frozen prod­ucts mar­kets. Prod­ucts include rye, sour­dough, Ital­ian, French, pan and wide pan breads, Kaiser rolls, hot dog and ham­burger buns, French rolls, bagels, and organic and frozen fully-baked bread prod­ucts. Its prod­ucts are sold in indi­vid­ual restau­rants and national restau­rant chains, quick ser­vice restau­rants, schools, insti­tu­tions, major league sports fran­chises, ware­house club stores, national gro­cery chains, and inde­pen­dent gro­cery stores. For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.alphabaking.com.

About The Kennedy Group

Head­quar­tered in Cleve­land, Ohio, The Kennedy Group is a leader in label­ing, pack­ag­ing, pro­mo­tions, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, and track­ing sys­tems for a vari­ety of indus­tries includ­ing food pro­cess­ing, house­hold chem­i­cal, con­sumer prod­ucts, indus­trial, auto­mo­tive, mate­r­ial han­dling, bio­med­ical, elec­tron­ics, elec­tri­cal and chemical.

Com­prised of four divi­sions, the Label­ing and Pack­ag­ing Divi­sion offers a wide vari­ety of pressure-sensitive, pro­mo­tional and roll-fed/ROSO film prod­ucts that cre­ate unique shelf appeal and pow­er­ful brand­ing solu­tions. The Mate­r­ial Han­dling Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Sys­tems Divi­sion pro­vides spe­cific iden­ti­fi­ca­tion solu­tions and label hold­ers for reusable con­tain­ers, racks and pal­let stor­age areas. In addi­tion, the com­pa­nies Pro­mo­tional Response Prod­ucts Divi­sion offers front-page adver­tis­ing pro­grams to news­pa­pers as well as a National Pro­gram, man­aged by TKG Media Net­work that pro­vides adver­tis­ers with a stream­lined process to place a wide assort­ment of col­or­ful, remov­able adver­tise­ments on the front pages of more than 450 news­pa­pers reach­ing over 35 mil­lion con­sumers daily. The RFID Solu­tions Divi­sion pro­vides turnkey assis­tance in help­ing major man­u­fac­tur­ers to test, spec­ify, install, ser­vice and sup­port their EPC-compliant, fully inte­grated sys­tems. Through its RFID Cus­tomer Solu­tion Cen­ter, The Kennedy Group helps cus­tomers ver­ify that the tech­nol­ogy will work in their appli­ca­tion to assist them with fur­ther­ing their efforts to meet EPC com­pli­ance. To learn more about The Kennedy Group visit www.kennedygrp.com.

About ORBIS Cor­po­ra­tion

ORBIS Cor­po­ra­tion is a wholly owned sub­sidiary of Menasha Cor­po­ra­tion. With more than 160 years of mate­r­ial han­dling exper­tise and 55 years of plas­tics inno­va­tions, ORBIS con­sists of a port­fo­lio of busi­nesses that meet the mate­r­ial han­dling needs of com­pa­nies across many indus­tries. ORBIS helps world-class cus­tomers move their prod­uct faster, safer and more cost-effectively with plas­tic reusable con­tain­ers, bulk sys­tems, pal­lets and pro­tec­tive dun­nage. Using a proven approach, ORBIS experts ana­lyze its cus­tomers’ sys­tems, design a solu­tion and exe­cute a reusable pack­ag­ing pro­gram for longer-term cost sav­ings and sus­tain­abil­ity. Using life-cycle assess­ments to com­pare reusable and single-use pack­ag­ing, ORBIS also helps cus­tomers reduce their over­all envi­ron­men­tal impact. ORBIS is a part of Menasha Cor­po­ra­tion, the 3rd old­est fam­ily owned busi­ness in the United States. As a stew­ard of sus­tain­abil­ity, ORBIS is com­mit­ted to a bet­ter world for future gen­er­a­tions. ORBIS tracks and mea­sure our own resource uti­liza­tion to con­tin­u­ously con­serve nat­ural resources and reduce waste. For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.orbiscorporation.com.

Source: The Kennedy Group / ORBIS Cor­po­ra­tion