Industrial Gas Cylinder Management
As Baosteel Gases embarks on the journey of growing its packaged gas business, the management team feels that it is essential to have a world-class cylinder management system that accomplishes the following efficiently:
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Track every cylinder during production and delivery
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Early alert when a cylinder is closed to check up or scrap date (*Chinese regulation require cylinders to scrap after 30 years)
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Know every cylinder location at any time, accurate inventory at all times
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Rank customers based on turnover rate so that customer services can be tiered
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Efficient operation by sharing information between purchasing, production, sales, and logistics.
Thingple implemented full Industrial gas management solutions (I.O.Cylinder) at Baosteel Gas Shanghai plant, including the inventory, track, and measurement modules. The solution is based on patent-pending UHF-RFID tags that are specifically designed for the industrial gas operating environment.
I.O.Cylinder solution covers the whole lifecycle of cylinder management.
Thingple Cylinder Tracking Solution
Thingple's I.O.Cylinder full solution is implemented at Baosteel Gas Shanghai plant:
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Gate system: With one RFID reader and four antennas, the gate system allows full truck of gas cylinders, traveling at < 5 km/hour to pass the gate, and 100% cylinders read.
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Gas filling line system: with one controller box every four filling line, and fixed RFID readers installed on each line, the gas filling line system allows gas filling information to be associated with each cylinder.
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Handheld: Handhelds are used for cylinder check-in/out, inspection, delivery/pickup, and maintenance operations.
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Tags: Thingple's high-performance UHF-RFID tags are fixed to each cylinder (by glue)
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Tag initialization station: Tag initialization station consists of an enclosed RFID reader/writer box, a laser engraving machine to engrave numbers and words on tag surface, and a computer with Thingple tag initialization program.
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I.O.Cylinder SaaS: provide customers a portal for management and operation reports. Also I.O.Cylinder SaaS is the back-end system for all front-end application
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I.O.Cylinder Mobile APP: the mobile APP allows management to keep the assets, operation process, and economic analysis report of each gas filling site at a fingertip.
Gate antennas
Filling line antennas
Benefits Delivered
After implementing over 2 years at Baosteel Gas Shanghai plant, and now all cylinders tagged, Baosteel Gas believes that the Thingple RFID cylinder management system is essential to its operation, benefits include:
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"Safeguard cylinder's safe operation by alerting functions"
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"Significantly improved operation efficiency"
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"Facilitated different department accessing same information on a timely basis to make smart decisions"
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"Provided much-needed statistics and analysis to allow management insights into the operation and business"
- Matt Zhang, Director of Baosteel Gas Packaged Gas
As Baosteel Gas grows its industrial gas business, Thingple's RFID cylinder management solution will be one of its key operation tools to manage the expanding assets and operations.
About Baosteel Gases
Baosteel Gases has business in air gases from cryogenic air separation plants (ASUs), synthetic gases, hydrogen, clean energy gases, and packaged gases. At present, it has more than 1,000 employees and 30 branch companies and subsidiaries. Baosteel Gas started in 2010, as a wholly state-owned-enterprise directly under Baosteel Metal Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of China’s Baowu Steel Group. Private Equity group PAG successfully acquired 51% of Baosteel Gas in August 2018