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BEA Telecom Asset Management RFID Solution

chrispeng January 5, 2022 asset Management

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This article starts with the business challenges of asset management in the telecom industry, introduces the advantages of RFID technology, and elaborates on BEA’s RFID solutions for asset management in the telecom industry.

Preface

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) electronic label technology has been widely used in various fields and links since the emergence of the Second World War in the last century. At present in my country, electronic tags are mainly used in many industries and related fields such as railways, postal services, public security, manufacturing, logistics, tobacco, retail, medicine, financial charging, telecommunications, and so on. The application environment of RFID technology in different industries is very different, resulting in very different technical requirements for RFID software and hardware facilities. Therefore, how to provide RFID solutions that adapt to the application characteristics of different industries is a realistic problem that every RFID software and hardware facility provider needs to face.

RFID technology tracks item information. Compared with other business systems, the number of events has increased by a thousand times. Therefore, the requirements for middleware to handle these events are more stringent. BEA is a global leader in applications and The service basic component supplier is the industry expert to solve these problems. Through the acquisition of ConnecTerra, a leader in the field of RFID middleware (one of the three technology vendors of the EPCglobal Architecture Review Committee, responsible for and leading the development of standards for many software levels of RFID), to further strengthen the leader in the field of RFID technology, BEA has become a veritable industry. The leading company that can provide a complete set of RFID software basic components.

Challenges of asset management business in the telecommunications industry

The rapid development of the communications industry and the rapid development of communications technology, as well as the formation of an economic globalized competitive environment, have made improving production methods, increasing operating efficiency, reducing operating costs, and improving service quality, and other management tasks, have become the top priorities of the current telecommunications enterprises’ operations. Heavy.

As one of the most important components of corporate assets, fixed assets are an important guarantee for the completion of production and operation tasks, and at the same time have a significant impact on the financial status of enterprises. Therefore, strengthen the management of fixed assets, ensure the integrity, preservation, and appreciation of fixed assets, correctly calculate the number and value of assets, clarify economic responsibilities, supervise and promote the proper storage and reasonable use of fixed assets, and continuously improve the utilization and integrity rate of equipment. Giving full play to the effectiveness of fixed assets and bringing maximum benefits to enterprises is the core goal of fixed asset management.

Fixed asset management currently relies more on traditional manual management methods and means. Data collection and entry have always been manual operations, with low efficiency and high error rates. The bar code technology that appeared later has greatly improved the situation, but due to the limitations of bar code technology itself, it is impossible for them to enter the field of telecommunication resource (asset) management in all aspects, such as telecom poles and manpower. Wells, cables, etc.

It can be seen that the current fixed asset management process in the telecommunications industry has the following shortcomings:

1. The lack of business contact and business communication between the financial management department of fixed asset management and the physical management department makes the book unable to reflect the existence of assets;
2. Possess a large number of expensive assets but no integrated information system, lack of valuable fixed asset management information, difficulty in managing fixed assets, and low work efficiency;
3. Card, actual discrepancy;
4. It is difficult to effectively control the loss of fixed assets;
5. Asset inventory is time-consuming, laborious, limited in effect, and “clear before and after chaos”;
6. Operating costs are difficult to calculate in a timely and accurate manner.

The rapid rise of RFID technology in recent years has completely changed the above-mentioned situation, and made resource (asset) management “transparency” truly possible.

Technical advantages of RFID technology in asset management

RFID technology emerges as the modern supply chain demands for efficiency, information flow and flexibility. Its overall advantages over barcode technology are as follows:

1. The ability to adapt to the environment has been strengthened, and it can enter the field of telecommunications resource management in an all-round way;
2. The degree of automation is improved, which greatly shortens the time for checking and checking assets in and out of the warehouse, and improves the efficiency of the entire business operation;
3. The ability to collect large quantities of data in real time, shorten the inventory counting time, and enhance the accuracy of the inventory;
4. With the help of industry standards and information sharing, telecommunication assets can be tracked in the entire circulation link, error links can be clarified, and management levels can be improved;

Therefore, RFID technology, as the latest means of asset basic data collection, can help telecommunications companies establish a unified, effective, real-time, and electronic process of asset resource management system, and connect various departments through the operation mode of networked centralized management. ,thereby:

1. Realize the whole life cycle management of equipment from purchase to scrap;
2. Solve the problem of inconsistencies in physical-card, card-financial accounts;
3. Improve the existing business process: from purchasing, warehousing to inventory, realizing automatic equipment identification;
4. Realize business collaboration, asset information sharing, multi-dimensional analysis, provide asset investment decision-making assistance support, and improve the work mode, process and effect of daily asset management.

BEA Telecom Industry Asset Management Solution

As a leading supplier of middleware in China’s telecommunications industry, BEA’s basic products are widely used in the construction of telecommunications business support systems.

BEA’s telecommunications industry asset management solution is built on BEA’s RFID middleware and original basic components, combined with BEA’s successful experience in other asset management projects and the business characteristics of the telecommunications industry, and adopts a service-oriented architecture ( SOA), flexible expansion while taking into account security and stability, this framework is suitable for the further application of RFID technology within the enterprise in the future, optimize the internal business process of the enterprise, and enhance the transparency and visibility of enterprise resource management.

The following figure describes the technical architecture of BEA’s RFID solution for asset management in the telecom industry:

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Figure BEA Telecom Industry Asset Management RFID Solution

The technical architecture of BEA’s telecommunications industry asset management RFID solution is implemented in five layers: RFID hardware layer (including electronic tags and readers), RFID edge server layer, RFID enterprise server layer, integration layer and application layer.

1. The RFID hardware layer is located at the bottom of the architecture. Its reader is controlled by a trigger and reads tags hundreds of times per second. At any time, the readers that can set the IP address are controlled by one and only one edge server to avoid problems related to network partitions.
2. At the RFID edge server layer, the edge server polls the reader regularly (for example, twice per second) to eliminate duplicate operations, and perform filtering and device management. The edge server also generates ALE events and sends the events to upper-layer applications. When sending a message, the message semantics of “success once” is usually required to ensure that the message is transmitted only once.
3. The RFID enterprise server layer enriches and stores electronic label events, while providing centralized management of edge servers.
4. The integration layer integrates existing business systems and supports the customized development of new business processes. By using control or service component technology, the existing business processing resources are maximized, and data and business can be aggregated by extracting, processing, and analyzing different business data.
5. The portal layer provides a human-computer interaction interface to realize the operation and management of the business.

RFID control information flows into the integration layer through the operation portal, then flows into the enterprise server layer, edge layer, and finally into the reader; and the RFID data obtained by the reader is filtered and transmitted along this chain.

Through the implementation of this application architecture, the 7 types of technical problems that RFID technology needs to face in enterprise applications can be solved well:

1. Scalability: Use thread multi-channel technology, non-blocking I/O technology to improve the CPU utilization of the edge server, adopt the “batch message transfer” mechanism, and use the edge server layer as the event source instead of the event repository, which can be very good The realization of system scaling.
2. Availability: By eliminating all single points of failure between the edge layer, the enterprise server layer, the integration layer, and between the layers, high availability can be well provided.
3. Security: Based on an open security framework that is easy to integrate with third-party vendors’ identity verification, authorization and auditing technologies, the industry’s best security practices can be adopted to provide the best security.
4. Interoperability: Follow industry standards and provide an open interoperability framework.
5. Integration: Integration is the best way to enhance the business value of RFID applications. RFID application architecture needs to support integration technology in order to integrate into the enterprise’s existing application environment faster and better, truly carry enterprise-level applications, and let RFID technology play a role Maximum value.
6. Management: RFID monitoring and management is realized through a centralized portal framework, and at the same time, through seamless integration with the existing enterprise information management framework, various functional modules of the RFID application framework can be well managed.
7. Message delivery: By providing the “one-time success” message transmission quality, ensuring the consistency of the transaction in and out of the message, and asynchronous communication, it can guarantee the stable and reliable transmission of the message.

The advantages of this program are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

1. It is an integrated but flexible framework that allows components to be inserted into the solution.
2. It is a connectivity asset that connects RFID readers, resource management systems, EPCIS and other telecommunications applications.
3. It is a service-oriented architecture approach (SOA) that takes full advantage of best practices that take into account the increase in integration options and the flexibility of the enterprise.

At the same time, the asset management RFID solution toolbox provided by BEA for free includes the codes, documents and best practices necessary for the rapid configuration and deployment of RFID application systems, and an accelerator for the implementation of RFID solutions. Its contents are:

1. The event model framework is used to accept incoming asynchronous events, such as reader events.
2. The message bus architecture enables events to be processed by multiple interested users.
3. Controls used to connect to other application systems such as EPCIS.
4. Pre-built Portlet components for the construction of business portals.
5. Pre-built business processes to handle various RFID-related events.
6. A full set of system documentation (software architecture guide, design documentation, operation manual, etc.).
7. Solution accelerator guide, project plan including work distribution structure and test plan
8. Development environment (build and test scripts, source code control, issue tracking, etc.).

This greatly shortens the delivery time of solutions using RFID technology and greatly reduces costs.

Concluding remarks

BEA’s RFID solution for telecommunications industry asset management is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework, combined with the business understanding of telecommunications industry asset management, and a customized RFID solution for asset management in the telecommunications industry will surely serve the domestic telecommunications industry. The improvement of industry asset management informationization once again paints a grand stroke.

About the Author

Zhou Guoli is an RFID solution architect, BEA

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