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Recently, live satellite company DIRECTV deployed an RFID system to track 200,000 pieces of equipment in three broadcast centers and 200 small facilities. According to the company, the system reduces inventory tracking time tenfold while increasing inventory accuracy from 75 percent to 97 percent. This solution, provided by RFID Global Solution, allows DIRECTV to take inventory of other equipment such as servers using handheld and desktop readers. The company owns equipment such as video compression equipment, amplifiers, routers, switches, decoders and antenna related systems, to which the company attaches passive UHF EPC Gen 2 RFID inlays for fast tracking.
In December 2014, the RFID system was put into use. Limited inventory count records indicate that with this system, a company’s complete inventory count time can be reduced from years to months. In the next phase, the company plans to use the system for the tagging and tracking of El Segundo Lab’s assets and 190 remote locations, 13 of which are broadcast centers and the rest are signal collection or uplink centers.
DIRECTV has three major broadcast centers (one in Colorado and two in the Los Angeles area) as well as several signal collection and uplink centers (for receiving local station data and converting it into a network), said Adam Seskin, manager of DIRECTV broadcast engineering assets. transmitted to company satellites.)
There are a lot of equipment on racks at each of the company’s premises, and these assets are replaced every 3-5 years. Seskin said it would take the company five years to conduct a complete inventory of $1 billion worth of assets at 200 sites. This means that some assets are obsolete before they even enter the company’s software-based inventory records. In order to make inventory tracking more efficient and accurate, DIRECTV and some RFID suppliers have discussed. Ultimately, the company chose RFID Global’s Visi-Trac system because of RFID Global’s flexibility and focus on custom development, Seskin said.
In this scenario, DIRECTV uses UHF tags from supply rooms such as Omni-ID. The company marks the new equipment before it arrives at the company’s three large broadcast centers and distribution warehouses in New Hampshire. When the equipment arrives at the unloading location, the staff will attach RFID tags and barcode labels to these items, and enter the equipment serial number, model and other description information corresponding to the ID number tag on the Visi-Trac system. Most of the labels are attached by stickers, and a small number are hung from the holes of the equipment by metal rings.
The barcode labels were part of the company’s original traceability system, Seskin explained. Now, when attaching the RFID tag, the staff needs to bind the barcode ID number and RFID unique identifier on the Visi-Trac system and upload it to the DIRECTV management software.
As items are placed on the rack, Visi-Trac stores their location information.Each rack also has an RFID tag attached and can be held by the Motorola MC3190-ZReaderIt is bound to the item tag ID number.
For inventory counts, staff need to use Zebra handheld readers andRFID Global SmartCarts reads rack and equipment tag ID numbers. This data will then be transmitted back to the Visi-Trac software on the DIRECTV server via WiFi.
The Visi-Trac software acts as an interface to the DIRECTV backend server and can be accessed using a reader. In this way, inventory personnel can timely detect abnormalities such as incorrect placement of items. In addition, the software also has a search function, which users can use to locate assets and add information to them (such as maintenance records or fault information) or change location information. In addition, users can view the layout map of the broadcast center on the PC side, and items whose tags have been read will be marked with different colors on the map. In addition, managers can log in to Visi-Trac to view broadcast center equipment details.
The system not only improves the speed of inventory checks, but also improves inventory accuracy, Hage said. In the past, inventory information was often inaccurate because employees couldn’t find or mistype an item’s serial number. Now, RFID technology greatly reduces the probability of error.
In addition, companies can use the collected data for asset lifecycle tracking and other business analysis, such as how often assets are moved, Hage said.
In the coming weeks, DIRECTV plans to conduct a full inventory at a broadcast center in Los Angeles. In the past, Seskin explained, it took staff three months to scan asset barcodes. With this system, that time was reduced to 10 days. He hopes the company can do the work every month at three large broadcast centers and increase inventory accuracy to 97 percent.
If the company could improve its inventory accuracy to 97 percent, it could save about $220 million in lost or misplaced assets, Seskin said.
In the future, Seskin said, he will require products to be marked on the supplier’s side. Of course, this plan ran into some difficulties because the supplier didn’t know the best place to attach it.
(The exclusive manuscript of rfid world network, please indicate the source author for reprinting!)
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