Bodega Norton Vineyard, Argentina
Hand-picking grapes is an age-old practice known to produce the best wine, but also logistics and administrative challenges. HID Global has combined RFID and NFC technologies to streamline these processes giving the Bodega Norton vineyard a further day of production.
Challenge
The Argentinean vineyard’s outdated, cumbersome tracking system was based on manual distribution and collection of thousands of plastic and aluminum chips. A full day was then dedicated to collecting, collating and processing the chips using a paper-based system.
Solution
The solution, developed in partnership with systems integrator Fundación Ada Byron, combines radio frequency identification (RFID) and near-field communication (NFC) technology: each harvester has an armband with a unique contactless HID ISO MIFARE® card, grape collection bins are tagged with HID Epoxy Disc tags and vineyard supervisors are outfitted with near field communication (NFC)-enabled smartphones.
To activate the system, supervisors simply place their smartphone next to the harvester’s armband triggering an audible beep that assures both the harvester and supervisor that the collection bin has been counted and credited to the right person.