The Client

Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Baie-D’Urfé, Quebec, Wirewerks is a Canadian manufacturer of advanced optical fiber and copper structured cabling systems. For more than three decades the company has engineered and built the physical-layer foundation for mission-critical networks across enterprise, data center, and broadband applications throughout the Americas.

Like any manufacturer moving physical product at scale, Wirewerks depends on knowing exactly where inventory sits at any moment — and on being able to find it fast.

The Challenge

As Wirewerks continued to grow, the team saw an opportunity to modernize how inventory was tracked across the warehouse and to reduce its reliance on individual familiarity with where each pallet was stored.

The company wanted a more precise, automated way to know where every pallet was at all times. The goals were clear:

• Track the exact location of every pallet in the warehouse in real time.
• Update locations automatically as pallets are moved, with no manual data entry.
• Eliminate the human error that comes with typing in locations by hand.
• Build on proven, reliable hardware the team could trust over the long term.

RFID was the natural fit. While location tracking itself is well established in logistics, Wirewerks wanted a level of precision and automation that would remove people from the data-entry loop entirely.

The Solution

Wirewerks turned to RFID Canada to architect the hardware foundation. Working closely with the Wirewerks team, RFID Canada scoped the application in detail and recommended the right combination of components — readers, antennas, and tags — to match the warehouse environment and the company’s specific requirements.

The approach is elegantly simple. Each storage location carries a location tag, and each pallet carries its own tag; the system pairs the two to record precisely where every pallet sits. An antenna mounted directly on the forklift reads the tags as material moves, so each time a pallet changes shelves or zones, its location is updated automatically — no clipboard, no keyboard, no guesswork.

At the heart of the deployment are FEIG RFID readers, a respected German-engineered platform sourced through RFID Canada. After roughly a year and a half of hands-on testing, the readers have proven dependable in day-to-day use.

On the software side, Wirewerks chose to build its own custom application rather than adopt a subscription-based middleware platform. Because the team knew precisely what they wanted, they developed software that communicates directly with the readers — giving them full control over the solution. RFID Canada supported that direction throughout, supplying the hardware, guidance, and responsive technical input that made an in-house build straightforward.

Why RFID Canada

Wirewerks could have sourced RFID components from any number of vendors. They chose to work with RFID Canada — and to keep coming back — for a few clear reasons:

• Deep RFID expertise. “You guys know RFID,” the project lead noted — a technical partner who understood the application end to end.
• Responsive, accessible support. A question by email reliably came back with an answer; when issues needed deeper discussion, RFID Canada’s technical team got on a call to work through them.
• Consultative scoping. Rather than simply quoting parts, RFID Canada took the time to understand exactly what Wirewerks needed and tailored its recommendations and quotes to the application.
• Quality hardware. Access to trusted, proven brands such as FEIG gave Wirewerks confidence in the long-term reliability of the system.

The Results

With the core architecture validated and a phased rollout now underway, Wirewerks is moving from manual, knowledge-dependent tracking to an automated system that delivers:

• Automatic, real-time location updates every time a pallet moves.
• Elimination of manual data entry for pallet locations, freeing staff from a time-consuming task.
• No more human error from mistyped locations — the tags do the work.
• A reliable hardware backbone proven over roughly 18 months of testing.

The proof of concept performed strongly from the outset, and that early success carried the project all the way through to deployment. Phase one puts the system into active use; subsequent phases will expand features and refine the experience — all built on the same dependable reader, antenna, and tag foundation.

“I could have bought these things from multiple vendors, but I went with RFID Canada because they gave me the best service and the best quotes for our application — and they wanted to understand exactly what we needed. The communication is great, the team is very responsive and easy to work with, and you can tell they really know RFID.”

— Jean-Sébastien Mercier-Angulo, Wirewerks