chrispeng [ad_1]
Seminole in Florida has attached EPC Gen2 passive tags to approximately 10,000 fixed assets. These tags can quickly check the inventory of 130 facilities and offices.
Since April 12, 2011, the department’s purchasing department began to use an RFID tracking system to manage its tangible assets. It is expected that this system will reduce the management costs of 130 pilots by 34%. The solution is provided by the system integrator Silent Partner Technologies, which greatly reduces the amount of labor and management personnel required by the procurement department.
Seminole, consisting of seven cities, is located in central Florida and has fixed assets worth US$90 million. These assets include electronic office equipment, tools used by public departments such as roads, transportation, and health, and high-value fire-fighting equipment used by fire safety departments. Procurement Supervisor Kernbezi said that the value of the equipment managed by the procurement department is $1,000 or more, so these equipment must be counted on the spot once a year. To accomplish this task, the department has been using Oracle’s JD Edwards system and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to record office or facility usage. The county’s relevant department lists a list of items every year, and the head of the department is responsible for checking whether the assets in the list actually exist. If there is any discrepancy, the purchasing department will follow up and investigate the whereabouts of the lost items.
For a long time, only one staff member in the Purchasing Department was responsible for supervising the county’s inventory count. But with the change of responsibilities, employees in this position have other greater responsibilities and spend very little time on inventory management.
“We need to find a more effective way to manage inventory.” Cohen said. About two years ago, the department started looking for a reliable RFID solution. She once used the CSL101-2 handheld RFID reader produced by Convergence Systems Ltd, but found that the JD Edwards system cannot support RFID reader data temporarily. According to Silent Partner’s President Ted’s description: The Purchasing Department began to cooperate with Silent Partner in 2010. From the end of 2010 to the beginning of 2011, EPC Gen2 labels have been attached to 10,000 assets.
The resulting system achieves the following effects: sampling inventory inspections are allowed at any time during the year. During the sampling inspection, they used CSL’s 101-2 handheld reader to obtain the serial numbers of these devices.
This fall, the region will make full use of this system to conduct annual inventory checks on all departments. The staff in the purchasing department will use CSL’s 101-2 handheld reader to collect information, instead of emailing the asset list form to each department. First, the staff download the data stored in Silent Partner’s back-end software using the handheld device. Then, RFID independent software stores and manages all the data related to each department and inventory, and interprets the displayed information through the number read by RFID. The reader lists the asset data of all the departments listed.
These employees will use various facilities to place readers near each asset and capture the unique ID code from the RFID tag of the project, so that it can be determined whether the asset can be found in the corresponding inventory. When the interview is completed, the staff brings the reader back to the purchasing office and uploads the collected details to the Silent Partner software system on the computer.
Cohen said: Any error, such as the loss of an item or being placed in the wrong location, will be detected, although the procurement department will not conduct any investigation until the entire inventory process is completed. At this time, the software will indicate whether the lost items are transferred to other departments. For example, the property lost from the public works department may be placed in the environmental protection affairs department that provides drinking water and treats sewage. The purchaser decides whether to accept the new location of each item or move its location.
By sampling and checking some underutilized assets, the system has already demonstrated its value, Cohen said. Those items that were not used because they were misplaced in the department should have been placed in another location or sold. As soon as the fall annual checklist was completed, Cohen said that she would immediately be able to obtain data on efficiency improvements provided by the RFID system. She predicts that the solution will reduce the labor cost of the procurement office by 34%. There are many departments that require only a few minutes for inventory detection, while other departments, such as the Public Works Department whose assets are distributed throughout Seminole County, will require a longer period of time. Time to check.
Recently, the public safety department has also begun to use the system to trace assets within the department. These assets include fire-fighting equipment and other emergency response tools. Items worth more than $1,000 have been tagged by the procurement department, and the staff of the Ministry of Public Security have also tagged the remaining approximately 6,000 mobile assets, such as fire trucks and other safety vehicles, to help manage the central warehouse in stock. This department uses the same type of label provided by Silent Partner as the purchasing department.
The public safety department also plans to use the system within two months to track medicines stored on emergency medical services (EMS) vehicles. EPC Gen 2 passive RFID tags will be applied to the emergency call sending medicine system, and the staff of the Ministry of Public Safety will use a handheld reader to carry out a sample inventory check on each vehicle, so as to ensure that the necessary medicines are available at all times.
Cohen also pointed out: Since tags are used on different types of devices, this poses a challenge to tag design. The whole region has a large number of underwater application equipment, such as water quality measurement equipment, and the purchasers use RFID tags provided by Confidex. Other assets, such as generators exposed outdoors, have to withstand outdoor wind and rain, and there are some relatively minor factors, such as radio interference. For this reason, Silent Partner provides a variety of RFID tags in a certain range of sizes, and some enhanced tags are suitable for applications in outdoor equipment.
In fact, ensuring that each project uses the best label is the biggest challenge the system faces, Kostis said. Silent Partner and Seminole County work together to ensure that the label can be affixed to each asset intact; he pointed out that this process involves trial and error, and specific label monitoring should be used. This requires RFID tag suppliers to customize about 10 different types of tags for equipment in the entire region.
[ad_2]
