Three fundamental elements everyone should consider to undergoing an RFID project
RFID technology has been around for years and organisations from all different industry backgrounds are adopting RFID technology to resolve pain points or pit falls in their processes. These pain points range are a wide variety of issues such as:
- Keeping track of tyres in the warehouse to reduce theft or misplacement.
- Automated RFID enable Kanban on materials in the warehouse ensuring t never run out.
- Tracking of vital medical equipment throughout the hospital.
- Prevent theft of expensive merchandise in the retail store.
- Tracking, sorting and picking packages being couriered to customers in a logistics company.
When considering an RFID based solution for your organisation there are three fundamental elements that you will need to think about before considering an RFID project.
- Budget - Do you have located budget for the project – before going down the route of seeing what RFID technology and software needed to fully implement the project, you need to make sure that you do have budget to do the project – we would often receive queries from organisations looking to know how much it would cost to implement and RFID solution and the answer we would give is “it depends…” which it really does, to get an accurate pricing we would need to discuss and even have meetings to check the scale of the project. RFID project doesn’t come cheap depending on the size of the project and how many tasks you want the RFID technology to perform you are looking at a couple of Tens of thousands.
- Software – the second element that you need to look at is the RFID software, a lot of this type of software is developed from scratch so you would need to discuss what information that you want to see. Whether that would be seeing real-time location of assets, real-time stock information or monitoring the condition of an asset i.e. how it performs. This would need to be considered and the more complex it is the more cost would be.
- Hardware – The correct hardware needs to be identified that will allow you to track and manage assets. Hardware such as RFID antennas, fixed readers, and handheld readers. But also, what type of RFID tag do you require? Do you need an Active RFID tag which has an internal battery to allow it deliver a constant signal that can be picked up by the RFID Antennas? Or do you require a passive RFID tag which as no internal battery and can only be read when triggered by an RFID reader? All of this would need to be discussed in the proposal and planning process.
If you would like more information on RFID technology/solution then please check out our RFID page for additional information on our website or if you would like to talk to our experienced VisionID Account manager then contact us today.
