Beyond the Barcode: How Businesses are Using RFID for Asset Tracking
Over the last decade, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has become more popular and more advanced to help companies track and manage their fixed asset tracking. However, the technology has still not reached it’s optimum usage. Currently RFID tagging is too expensive to use on everything, so far it’s only really been used on the manufacturer stages. The ideal use of RFID would be to track individual items off the shop shelves.
RFID is a modern way of tracking assets, similar to a barcode. 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 RFID reader uses radio waves to read the data off the chip regarding the asset.
Although, RFID asset tracking software has yet to be univesally adopted by companies, a significant amount of companies within the United States are already taking advantage of the RFID tagging 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 great deal of the companies using this method of tracking are government controlled.
Although the majority of companies know why RFID is so important, but they haven’t got the money to buy into it. In the last few years, tracking your assets has become a vital part of business. However, a great deal of companies are finding that auditing assets takes time and can lose the business money. Some companies find that several months after auditing, they have missed a large amount of their assets.
By adding these tags to your assets, you can then track hundreds of your items all at the same time, remotely. This helps you to manage your assets more simply.
Unilever is just one of the big names that are using RFID tracking in their factories. 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 is in the fire service, they can track equipment to save vital 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. Generally the advanced tags cost around $50, definately not making it cheap to track your companies assets. Hopefully the costs of the tags will fall as the money needed to develop them does. As soon as more companies use this form of tracking, asset tracking software programs will become more used and more advanced.
Tags: asset tracking, rfid asset tracking, radio frequency identification, RFID, asset tracking iphone
