Florida State Court Inspection Office upgrades RFID case file tracking system
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The Inspectorate of the 15th Circuit Court of Florida installed an RFID case file tracking system in its four-story office building, which greatly reduced the time for case file search and saved an average of $100,000 per year, according to the Court’s Chief Information Officer Dan Zinn say. The Inspection Office formally installed this system in 2007 and has now upgraded the system to supply power to RFID readers through an Ethernet connection; dozens of readers have also been added to provide all employees with RFID badges.
The inspection office has approximately 21,000 active case files. In this 45,000-square-foot, four-story building, documents are often circulated among different departments and offices. Normally, a file may be missing 5 times a day, and each time employees have to stop working to find it. Documents for serious cases are usually very urgent, for example, sometimes the court will suddenly use them. The 120 employees of the serious crime team often had to stop their work until the documents were found. Zinn has been considering the use of RFID solutions to track documents in the past, however, the earliest documents must be tracked with expensive active tags (tags are about $5).
For this reason, Zinn had to temporarily shelved the plan. He explained that until the Gen 2 UHF passive tags were launched, the tag price dropped from U.S. dollars to U.S. cents. The Inspection Department began to cooperate with the system integrator SimplyRFID. Zinn’s department began to paste a 1*4 inch paper label with Alien Technology’s EPC Gen 2 RFID tag embedded on each file folder. The integrator installed 18 readers in the office area to track the location of files.
Following the success of the pilot area, Carl Brown, Chairman of SimplyRFID, stated that the office began to install RFID readers on the ceiling and added enough antennas to cover the entire office area for serious cases. A total of 67 readers have been installed throughout the application, with a total of 117 reading points. The newly installed readers of ThingMagic use Power over Ethernet. By avoiding the installation of AC power cords for each new reader, Brown says, it makes the entire application simpler and cheaper.
Now, the Inspectorate of the 15th Circuit Court of Florida has begun to distribute badges with Alien Passive Gen 2 UHF tags to 350 employees, including all employees in the felony and misdemeanor departments. The unique ID of the tag is in the PanGo software of InnerWireless and Corresponding to employee data.
In this way, Zinn says, the system can track the location of specific employees in the building. In the future, he added that the system can also determine which employee owns which file. Currently, the system is only used to locate employees in real time.
So far, the office has completed the labeling of nearly 18,000 documents. The staff can check the location of the documents in real time. The documents appear in the form of images on the floor plan of the building on the computer screen of the back-end system. The office still uses 1*4 inch paper self-adhesive labels with Alien EPC Gen 2 RFID inlays. Employees use Zebra printer encoding machines to print and encode each label. The label ID code includes a 5-digit commercial and government agency code (CAGE). In this way, the reader of the prosecutor’s office cannot recognize the RFID tags of documents of other institutions.
The data from the reader is transferred to the PanGo software via Ethernet. The latter associates the tag ID code with the file data, such as the code of the case, the name of the person in the case, and the circulation history. Employees can then check the exact location of the file on the computer screen.
In the initial period, the inspection agency used a total of 18 readers, Zinn said, the readers can accurately locate the file location within 20 feet. However, it is still difficult to find documents at this distance. For example, hundreds of documents may be placed in several compartments in the office. The Inspection Office installed additional readers in July 2008, and began to increase the installation of readers in July 2008, covering the entire crime team.
According to Zinn, the expansion of the system cost a total of US$100,000, and the investment cost was recovered within 18 months.
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