Opened in 1992, Toyota's Burnaston plant (Derbyshire, England) employs approximately 3,000 workers and produces 220,000 Corolla and Avensis automobiles annually. Although, Toyota equipped the plant with an RFID system over a decade ago, the company decided it needed to update the system to keep pace with recent process developments and the plant's challenging environmental conditions.
Among other drawbacks, the existing system was limited by the fact that it could only process 40 bytes of data per tag. It also had a maximum operating temperature of 140 F, which meant it couldn't be used in the facility's 390 F ovens.