RFID Is Superior to Barcodes for Tracking Assets – Are You Using It?
Over the last decade, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has become more popular and more advanced to help companies track and manage their fixed assets. However, the technology has still not reached it’s optimum 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 is a form of tracking, very similar to barcodes. A barcode is a simple visible data storing tag that is read by a scanner device. An RFID tag is a chip that can be accessed remotely using an RFID reader, it stores data about the item it’s attached to and then sends it to the reader. The reader sends out radio waves to connect to the chip and retrieve the data about the item.
In spite of the fact that, radio frequency idenfitication for asset tracking has yet to be univesally adopted by companies, a large number of industries in the US have already started using the technology 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.
Many companies do understand why RFID is so good, however, they haveb’t invested in it. In the past decade, the importance of tracking your assets has become vital. However, all companies know that auditing their assets slows down business. Many also find that after auditing, they have missed some of their assets.
Using RFID tags on a large number of your assets, you are able to track hundreds of your items instantly from a location within the tags range. This makes the task of managing all your assets alot easier.
An example of where RFID tags have been so useful is in the Unilever factory in England. They have added the tracking tags to around 20,000 items on their production line. These tags make it easier for them to audit their assets remotely, if this was done manually, they would end up shutting down the production process.
This example is just one to show how RFID can really save your business time and money. There is a huge number of examples. Another example is in the fire service, they can track equipment to save vital time. It also makes sure that unequipped vehicles don’t go to the scene of an accident.
Unfortunately, RFID tracking can be expensive. With the better RFID tags costing between $40 and $60, it’s not cheap to efficiently track your assets. Hopefully the costs of the tags will fall as the money needed to develop them does. Once this form of tracking becomes more widespread, asset tracking software programs will become more widely used.