Kawasaki Motors has selected Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi products to support its warehousing, production, quality control and parts management operations. It replaced Cisco Wi-Fi solutions.
Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi will benefit Kawasaki Motors’ 2,600 employees working across over two million square feet of manufacturing, back office and warehousing space.
The new Wi-Fi infrastructure will support applications — quality control and inventory management systems, inter-staff voice communication and digital signage, etc. – available on mobile devices such as Siemens WL2 VoIP Wi-Fi phones for inter-staff voice communications, Apple iPads, Datalogic Elf and Symbol barcode scanners placed on forklifts.
Cisco Wi-Fi failed to deliver
Kawasaki Motors officials felt their the existing Cisco Wi-Fi system created disconnections as the environment became more challenging from an RF and data capacity perspective. It also failed to provide ubiquitous Wi-Fi signal coverage, consistent high-speed data connectivity and support for high-density locations within certain parts of the facility.
“When we began testing Ruckus ZoneFlex system in our plant, we saw improvements in coverage and reliable connectivity at higher data rates than we had previously experienced, and with fewer access points deployed. This surprised us, so we made the move to Ruckus,” said Paul Kramer, IT manager for Kawasaki Motors.
Kawasaki deployed nearly 100 three-stream, dual-band 802.11n Ruckus ZoneFlex 7982 indoor access points, each of which integrate a dual-polarized, patented, adaptive antenna array and custom software such as ChannelFly – all of which combine to automatically and continuously select the best signal path and best RF channel for each device.
Kawasaki now experiences better quality VoIP communications and up to a five times increase in the amount of products they can scan through its system.
ZoneFlex Smart Wi-Fi system has allowed Kawasaki to lower the cost of supply chain management processes while speeding our production environment.
Because of the stronger signal strength delivered by the Ruckus access points, battery life on Kawasaki Motors’ handheld devices has also improved.
The Ruckus Smart antenna is better at transmitting and receiving signals so the devices can make a better connection using less power in both directions.
Kawasaki has applications where Apple iPods are strapped to workers’ arms within its warehousing environments for picking applications. The dual-polarization of the Ruckus smart antenna technology makes a big difference in these types of applications.
