Re-usable packaging [for magnet wires]

Reusable packaging has been with the magnet wire industry for 30 years. It has primarily been limited to plastic spools and reels. What had been very apparent over the years is that loss and damage to those reels has been very high. With a large customer base, knowing if the reels and spools have come back has been impossible. Many manual systems have been tried and have failed. The nature of the recovery procedures, in that full trucks have been necessary to keep the return cost down, necessitated that reels and spools from different customers had to be mixed in the trucks. This made defining who they came back from with a manual system impossible. In recent years, bar coding has become a solid technology. Over the last two years, the author´s company have looked at the millions of dollars they have spent on new reels and spools and worked on a new tracking system. They have come up with what the author considers the best-in-class tracking system utilizing the present labels that they apply to the spools and reels. This paper presents an outline of that system