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The past 10 years has seen the development of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) rocket, making it easier for all companies to track and manage their fixed assets. However, the tech has not yet reached it’s optimial usage. At the moment the technology is very expensive to implement so it’s been restricted to expensive and high priority items. The ideal use of the technology would be to track items off store shelves for stock level purposes.

RFID is very similar to barcodes, it’s a technology used to track equipment, vehicles and objects. A barcode is a simple visible data storing tag that is read by a scanner device. An RFID tag is a chip that can be accessed remotely using an RFID reader, it stores data about the item it’s attached to and then sends it to the reader. The RFID reader uses radio waves to read the data off the chip regarding the asset.

Although, RFID asset tracking has yet to gain widespread use, a significant amount of companies within the United States are already taking advantage of the RFID tagging for other purposes. Identity cards, travel ticketing systems, and inventory tagging for the likes of museums and libraries are just some of the many services that use RFID technology. A great deal of the companies using this method of tracking are government controlled.

A large number of companies haven’t yet bought into RFID, despite knowing why it’s so useful. In the last few years, tracking your assets has become a vital part of business. However, many companies find auditing their assets costly as it can slow their business down. Quite a few companies find that they have missed a number of their items after auditing.

By implementing RFID tags onto the majority of your assets, you can track and read hundreds of your items all at the same time. This makes managing your assets a whole lot simpler.

One example of where RFID have become useful is in a Unilever factory. They have taken over 20,000 items on their production line and added the RFID tags. The tagging system allows Unilever to audit their items from a remote location, whereas if they had to do this manually, it would result in shutting down the production line.

This is just one example where RFID tracking can help your business and avoid you loosing money. There is a huge number of examples. Another example is in the fire service, they can track equipment to save vital time. It also ensures that when the vehicle goes to the incident, it’s got the correct tools required.

However, currently tracking using RFID is not cheap. Generally the advanced tags cost around $50, definately not making it cheap to track your companies assets. Hopefully these costs will come down as the technology comes closer to it’s optimal usage. Once more industries adopt this method of asset tracking, inventory tracking programs will become more used and more advanced.