There are a lot of myths out there about the relative usefulness of passive RFID tags in tracking assets that we come up against when talking to business about their IT visibility challenges. Myths like “passive RFID still requires humans to manually scan tags regularly; without that we don’t get real time visibility” or “we have too many users of our IT assets and those assets are moved around too frequently and too far afield for passive RFID tags to make any sense”.
We recently worked with a major professional services and management consulting company that works some of the biggest organizations around the world on what might appear as a basic task – more reliable tracking office equipment inventory and usage and checking in/checking out of corporate laptops and other IT assets. This is a perfect use case for passive RFID tags and our Asset Vue Inventory system, but too many companies out there don’t think it’s worth implementing a system for something like this.
For this very large, global company, the status quo of manually tracking laptops as they were checked out and returned simply wasn’t working any more, and managers felt, but weren’t sure, that office equipment was not being tracked effectively and information across the company was inconsistent. For example, anecdotally they knew old equipment was being replaced, but not retired, and that equipment was borrowed by other departments and not returned, increasing costs across the board.
In our work with this organization, the customer wanted inexpensive passive RFID tags to tag every piece of equipment – and every laptop – that needed to be tracked at locations throughout the world. For the laptops, we integrated these tags with the existing check in/check out system, creating one central database of IT and office equipment assets and their status.
With today’s technology and innovation we can accomplish so much more to achieve results beyond our expectations. Reach out to us and let’s talk about how you might achieve these results.
