Marking of products and tranportation units-information contents and marking technologies

During this master thesis work that was conducted as a case study together with SWEP International, we have investigated marking standards and marking technologies that support handling of varying customer demands and increased information density. We also studied SWEP’s internal information handling and traceability. We were asked to specifically look at the usefulness of RFID for SWEP, and came to the conclusion that this technology presently does not solve any of SWEP’s problems in an economically realistic way. In SWEP’s production RFID is not applicable due to cost and the fact that the brazing process, that all products passes, result in that the same marking cannot be used throughout the entire production. We have not found any customers that currently request this technology and likely only a limited group of customers will in the near future be able to read information stored in this way. To be able to increase the amount of information in markings SWEP can use more modern symbologies for coding barcodes, for example Code 128 and the two-dimensional symbology Data Matrix, both of which has been requested by customers. The American car industry organization AIAG has developed a standard for transportation marking that can be used to cover the majority of customer demands regarding this type of marking. This standard can be used with both the Code 39 symbology currently used by SWEP as well as Code 128 that is requested by some customers. Other methods for information transfer, such as EDI, can be made more adapted to customer demands than labels but will not replace the need for some physical information carrier for the address and identification of the shipment