RFID helps the U.S. Food and Drug Administration track important documents
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The Office of Daily Affairs (ORA) of the US Food and Drug Administration plans to install RFID systems in 18 of 28 district offices across the country in the first quarter of 2008. FileTrail, a California-based document tracking and records management solution provider, will provide an RFID system for the application, tracking a total of approximately 150,000 survey documents, which are often circulated between offices and employees.
The San Francisco ORA office first installed this system in March 2006. The office’s quality management manager Mohammad Samimi said that they have now fully adopted this system to track 10,000 documents. “This system saves a lot of time” Samimi commented.
RFID document tracking
As the executive department of FDA, ORA dispatches inspectors to various places and companies to visit, and records each visit and corresponding investigation reports. Since many of these materials cannot be stored or maintained electronically, the task of tracking files has become a headache.
After adopting the new system, most of the file processing procedures have been automated.
Each document is assigned a color-coded label with an identification code (human-readable text and barcode) and the name of the company being reviewed, said Tom Pemberton, FileTrail product strategy manager. The tag is embedded with a UHF EPC Gen 2 passive RFID inlay. The staff uses DeskTracker to read the RFID inlay of the tag, which is a desktop reader connected to a PC. The EPC number and date of the label are then uploaded to the ORA back-end data system. Record the detailed information of the employee’s input file, which corresponds to the EPC code and the printed digital identifier. The employee then sticks the label on the document, and places the document on the corresponding shelf according to the color code and digital identifier of the label.
According to Samimi, the DeskTracker reader can read a stack of files at the same time. When an employee wants to take a document, he uses a reader to read the RFID tag of the document, and a barcode reader (connected to the RFID reader) scans the barcode on the ID badge he wears. This self-collecting file system has been working well.
Tag data is stored on ORA’s local server, Samimi said, maintained by ORA. FileTrail’s software allows ORA to search for the location record of a certain file, and automatically notify employees via email whether the storage time of the file exceeds the set time limit.
Samimi said the office plans to introduce an Intermec handheld RFID reader in 2008 to check the file room or search for lost files in other areas of the office. He also plans to install FileTrail’s fixed RFID reader ZoneTrackers in each office so that when a document enters a certain department, the reader can obtain the ID number of the tag at the door.
The 18 ORA district offices will use the same FileTrail RFID tracking system, but the format used in different places may be different, Pemberton said.
“Evaluation of return on investment is one of the challenges we face,” Pemberton said. “The problem of tracking and finding files is difficult to evaluate. Many people don’t realize this problem and think it’s just a part of daily life.”
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