By Narasimha Kandade  

An RFID asset tracking system is acquired by an organization to run its operations. This could be IT assets, furniture & fixtures, lab equipment, plant & machinery etc. Once the acquisition is done, it becomes critical for companies & organizations to know the whereabouts & condition of their assets. The larger & widespread the organization is the more difficult it becomes to keep track of the assets which very often keep moving around unless they are fixed assets.

Not only the location changes but also the ownership i.e. department/employee that the asset gets assigned to keeps changing from time to time. Therefore it is very crucial to get real-time updates on the “status” of any asset. This information/data helps companies to get complete visibility of the assets procured as well as utilization. The management can then look at this data to make informed decisions on the procurement of new assets. Needless to say that it leads to a huge benefit in terms of CAPEX spending.

Now having said this the question arises as to how does one track the assets and get an overview of all the assets that the company possesses at any given point in time. This is where IoT comes into play.

Various technologies ranging from UHF RFID, BLE to UWB RTLS can be used to track assets in real-time. UHF RFID is the most cost-effective technology as of the date that can be used. Once the assets are tagged, the same can be tracked by installing fixed readers at entry/exit points of the premises as well as capture the data using handheld. The real-time data is then updated into the systems to get the latest status of the asset.

Having captured the data, one can run analytics so as to get detailed information of any asset/s and its utilization.

By implementing the tracking of assets and verification, companies can now get very accurate data on their assets as well as comply with audit requirements.