The past 10 years has seen the development of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) rocket, making it easier for all companies to track and manage their fixed assets. However, the tech has not yet reached it’s optimial usage. Currently the technology is too expensive and is only really used at the manufacturer level or on more expensive products. The ideal use of RFID would be to track individual items off the shop shelves.
RFID technology performs a similar job as a barcode, it stores data about an asset, piece of equipment container or vehicle. A barcode is a visible tagging system, used to store product information, and is then read by a scanner tool. An RFID tag is a chip that’s included into the item that stores data, it can then be accessed remotely using an RFID reader. The reader sends out radio waves to connect to the chip and retrieve the data about the item.
While, RFID asset tracking has yet to be univesally adopted by companies, in the US there are a large number of companies that are already using this tagging system for other purposes. New passports, public transport payment methods, libraries and museums are just a few of the services that use the RFID tags. A large number of the users are government run.
Many companies do understand why RFID is so good, however, they haveb’t invested in it. In the last few years, tracking your assets has become a vital part of business. However, all companies know that auditing their assets slows down business. Many also find that they have missed items when they are auditing.
By implementing RFID tags onto the majority of your assets, you can track and read hundreds of your items all at the same time. This makes the task of managing all your assets alot easier.
Just one company that is using RFID tech is Unilever. They have attached over 20,000 tracking tags to assets on their production lines. These tags mean that the company can audit their items remotely, avoiding having to shut down the production line for a manual audit.
This is just one example where RFID tracking can help your business and avoid you loosing money. There are many other examples. Another example would be in the emergancy services, allowing them to track vital pieces of equipment, saving time. It also ensures that a rescue vehicle doesn’t travel to an incident without the required equipment.
However, currently tracking using RFID is not cheap. With the better RFID tags costing between $40 and $60, it’s not cheap to efficiently track your assets. Hopefully costs will fall as the technology becomes cheaper to develop. Once this method of asset tracking becomes more well known fixed asset tracking programs will be used more and be more advanced.
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