Managing Corporate Assets with RFID - Part Four

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Unilever is also leveraging the additional memory on Active tags to create a complete history of each asset, from initial purchase order number, through location, unique serial number and its child/parent relationship to other machinery and full maintenance history.

This latter point is particularly important for the management of complex equipment comprised of multiple components and for environments requiring the highest level of health and safety check and audit. With this technology, each assembly line manager can be tasked with maintaining a specific list of assets. Using a handheld PDA, physical audits can be done regularly. Information is directly input into the integrated fixed asset register and maintenance system and exception reports highlight any missing assets.

This implementation of RFID within Unilever demonstrates the technology’s potential for fixed asset management across every industry sector. By creating a single source of asset purchase, location, maintenance and disposal information, organizations can reduce errors and attain an immediate view of maintenance status at any time. In critical environments such as emergency services, this up-to-date information on equipment status not only saves time but also minimizes the risk of an ambulance or fire engine arriving at an incident without fully compliant equipment.

Furthermore, the process is simple and straightforward, requiring minimal resources, which drives down costs. And this is an essential point: Despite growing pressure to deliver asset accountability and traceability, organizations simply cannot afford to undertake repeated manual physical audits, each of which can take months.

By adopting RFID, not only can physical audits be done by line managers on a regular basis in a matter of minutes, without impacting the organization’s core operations in any way, but also the tight integration with the full asset history ensures unprecedented accuracy and auditability of the entire asset register.

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