Nuts and Bolts Business Meets 21st Century Tech, with Help from UW

Endries International, of Brillion, Wis., has more than 500 customers worldwide, stretching far beyond its birthplace in northeast Wisconsin to Europe, Mexico and Canada. Endries manages more than a half million items. Recently, Endries introduced Pulse, an automated, foolproof mechanism that instantly informs the company when a bin is empty. While Endries processes the order to replenish the empty bin, the customer obtains the same part from a second bin.

Until recently, Endries only received the “empty” notice after its service representative checked every bin at a customer’s facility, which might happen only once or twice a week. Now, with a new, high-tech solution crafted in cooperation with UW–Madison engineers, workers on the manufacturing floor simply drop the empty bin into a chute for electronic identification.

The technology for PULSE is called RFID (radio frequency identification). Unlike bar coding, no line-of-sight connection is required between the tag and the sensor.PULSE offers compounding benefits to Endries, which has grown into the fifth-largest fastener distributor in the nation.