MHB AV

 



Listen to what Thiadrik has to say about RFID in their warehouse!


RFID, or radio-frequency identification, has been a hot topic in the warehousing world for a while now. Companies within the AV & event industries are in need of finding more efficient ways to track inventory and get a better overview of their stock levels, as demand for events is rapidly increasing, especially after the pandemic cooled down. 

For example, the Netherlands saw a record number of festival and concert attendees in 2022, 8% more than before the pandemic to be more exact, according to the Association of Event Makers (VVEM). At the same time, Europe’s biggest festivals saw a spike in demand, tickets being sold out minutes after being launched in the market (according to IQ Magazine).

While more demand is great, it also implies more work for event companies. When a production company works with large stocks of equipment, they tend to dedicate more space for valuable assets and little room for bulk items, since they can be thrown around more easily. That’s when mistakes can happen, and having lost bulk items is common for most companies in the industry, especially when dealing with numerous events per month. 

 

The challenge

MHB knows the struggle of keeping track of inventory. Having operated for more than 10 years in the event industry in and around the Netherlands, quiet and relaxing days are a rare occurrence.

Thiadrik, the warehouse manager of MHB, has worked in the field for over 25 years and knows all the ins and outs of how to pull off a successful event. Making sure all projects are aligned, all equipment is in order and ready to be used for events, and of course, being a Rentman master planner is what he deals with on a daily basis.



Mistakes can happen from time to time, especially during high season. Even if companies manage to keep track of their most valuable items, keeping track of loose and bulk items is often a challenge. This is also the case for MHB. After the company grew and got involved in multiple projects, keeping track of hundreds of cables became an almost impossible task.

To ensure mistakes are minimal, most companies manually count and scan each item (for example, using Rentman’s equipment tracking capabilities). However, this takes time and can get tiring for large-scale events that require hundreds of items.

 

MHB was among the first Rentman users to request new tracking features, and RFID was the ideal solution for them. They saw a need to improve their tracking efficiency due to an increase in the number of productions.

RFID in action

After months in development, we paid a visit to MHB to see how well they integrated RFID tracking in their day-to-day warehouse activities. Thiadrik, who was already enthusiastic about this feature, decided to test it on 70 cables, which already had RFID tags attached.
The test was simple: grab 70 cables from the shelves, scan all of them and place them inside a flight case. No better challenger than Thiadrik, who’s been doing this exact job for the past 2 decades. After the timer stopped, the task was finished in 2 minutes and 23 seconds, of which 2 minutes were spent manually scanning the cables.

Now it was time to let RFID shine. All Thiadrik had to do was grab the cables and place them inside the flight case (which once again took 23 seconds) and scan everything using the RFID scanner. Compared to two minutes of manually scanning the cables, using RFID took only 10 seconds. That’s a 91.6% decrease in time spent scanning!