RFID Guru Blog

Asset tracking using active Wi-Fi enabled radio frequency identification (RFID) tags provide a clear path to return on investment (ROI) if you know where to look, according to a recent study from Forrester Research. Forrester created two conservative ROI models profiling sample companies tagging more than 1,000 assets during three consecutive years. The first sample company is a parts supplier to auto original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) tracking reusable bins. The second is a hospital tracking mobile equipment. The biggest differences between the two were the number of inventory audits being performed and the amount of time it took staff to locate the asset when they needed to use it.

The result: For the highly controlled parts manufacturer, an estimated 9% ROI. However, for the hospital with limited preexisting controls and staff who spend an inordinate amount of time searching for assets, the estimated return jumps to 69% ROI with cumulative benefits of more than $1 million. Plus, the companies saw future rewards like using the data to analyze and improve process flows.

Over the past decade, RFID technology has matured beyond experimental lab testing into a viable solution for tracking the physical location of assets in a variety of operating environments. But for many companies, determining the business value of moving to active RFID has been an elusive task, according to Forrester analysts Patrick Connaughton and Roy Wildeman.

Providing some insight into scenario No. 2, a hospital implements an asset tagging and tracking program that assumes infusion pumps and wheelchairs are being tagged first, medical staff will spend 20% less time searching and maintenance and audit will spend 50% less time.

It also assumes one thousand assets are tagged during the three years, the hospital spends $350,000 for software licenses, wheelchairs are being searched for more frequently than pumps, and three complete inventory audits are done annually.

Forrester analysts say success hinges on process improvements, not necessarily technology. It’s not just the immediate labor savings that drive the ROI. It’s supporting and continuous process improvements in inventory distribution and smarter procurement that make a difference.

• The value of the asset is not as important as how frequently it’s being searched for. Forrester analysis showed the benefits of tagging wheelchairs was actually greater than those from tagging more expensive pumps because of the higher frequency wheelchairs are being looked for.
• Start with at least 500 mobile assets to tag. To realistically absorb the initial implementation costs, a company would need to plan to tag at least 500 mobile assets to see a return within three years.
• Don’t overestimate benefits. These models are extremely conservative in benefits calculations, exaggerated on costs, and the risks factored in also often assume no benefits as the worst case scenario. Use this as a starting point and scale it back even further for your project to ensure that expectations are met.
• Establish clear and definable metrics. For this model, we used the labor costs and amount of time saved as the primarily variables in the benefit calculations. If that does not work for your company, then find a metric that does, and define it very clearly to all of the stakeholders. Without early buy-in on this basic assumption, it will be difficult to gauge success later on in the project.

April 25, 2008—Eastern European oil company Rompetrol is employing RFID seals known as Hi-G-Locks as part of the Hi-G-Tek Tanker Truck Monitoring Solution (TTMS) used on 80 company fuel trucks to protect and manage its product. Trucks transport fuel from gas depots to gas stations in remote areas of Romania and Bulgaria.

The company ships crude oil from Russia and Saudi Arabia to its refinery on the Black Sea. From there, the refined gasoline is shipped by rail and truck to oil depots in Eastern Europe. Rompetrol stores the fuel in such depots until it is shipped by truck to gas stations. It is this secondary distribution chain—from depot to gas station—that the oil company is tracking with Hi-G-Tek seals.

Larry Blue

Until recently, the trucks were tracked manually, and security was one of the company’s greatest concerns. With the high price of fuel, a portion of a truck’s gas was often stolen before a vehicle reached a gas station. For instance, a driver could siphon off gas without being detected by Rompetrol. In addition, the company sought a system that would reduce excess inventory that was being stored for transportation or delivered to gas stations because employees didn’t know the exact amount of gas already on the road or delivered at any given time. Before the Hi-G-Tek system was installed in September 2007, workers spent hours on manifest reconciliation, attempting to track the location and movement of gas, as well as determine how much fuel was delivered where, all on paper.

The company is now using a monitoring solution provided by Hi-G-Tek. The system includes RFID-based seals on trucks, as well as RFID interrogators deployed at depots and gas stations and on trucks. With this solution, the company can now track when its trucks and fuel arrive at a station, as well as when they leave and return to a depot. Thanks to a built-in alerting system, Rompetrol can ensure that the wrong fuel is not pumped into the incorrect tank, says Hi-G-Tek’s president and CEO, Larry Blue.

With the RFID system, each truck is equipped with several Hi-G-Locks. Some are used to seal hatches located on the top of the tank for inspection of the tank’s interior, while another slightly different variation is utilized to seal the valves through which fuel is loaded and then dispensed into gas station tanks. A truck typically has a total of five Hi-G-Locks. Each seal includes both a 433 MHz active tag and 125 kHz passive RFID tag. The 125 kHz version stores a unique ID number, and as the vehicle is loaded with fuel at a depot, its driver can use a handheld Hi-G-Tek interrogator to encode the tag with data, such as the shipment manifest, the specific product being delivered and where it is headed. Approximately 10 Rompetrol depots in Romania and Bulgaria presently use the system.

Electrical currents that oscillate at RF have special properties not shared by direct current signals. One such property is the ease with which it can ionize air to create a conductive path through air. This property is exploited by ‘high frequency’ units used in electric arc welding. Another special property is an electromagnetic force that drives the RF current to the surface of conductors, known as the skin effect. Another property is the ability to appear to flow through paths that contain insulating material, like the dielectric insulator of a capacitor. The degree of effect of these properties depend on the frequency of the signals.

Radio waves are usually produced by electric current alternating at radio frequency flowing in a special purpose conductor, called an antenna. Antenna dimensions must generally be comparable to wavelength to work efficiently. Very long waves are not practical because of the enormous antennas needed to produce them, although they are sometimes produced by lightning. Radio waves are also produced by cosmic phenomena in deep space. Actually, any kind of reciprocating motion of electric charges or magnets can produce radio waves if it is fast enough. Although very impractical, even a person waving a charged stick very fast can produce faint radio waves.

Propagation is a term that describes the travel of electromagnetic waves, there being three principle main modes of propagation. The first is a straight line travel: the manner that radio waves travel through deep space (ignoring the slight deviations caused by gravity under the theory of relativity). A second way is skip, which is bouncing between the surface of the earth and the ionosphere. Frequencies between 3 MHz and 30 MHz are most reliable for this kind of propagation, called High Frequency. The third way is to hug the surface of the earth as it curves around. Radio waves of very low frequency most often travel this way.

 AT&T is keen on targeting the K - 12 education sector and for this purpose it has come up with an interoperable RFID and GPS based mobile resource management solution. The solution is expected to help in ensuring a better control over vehicles of the institutions, enhance safety of the students, bring down costs and increase staff productivity. This is the first network services company which has come forward to offer an integrated RFID and MRM solution for educational sector.

Now Is the Right Time to Consolidate Student LoansStudents graduate from college with that prize possession: the much-anticipated college degree. Then there are those students who graduate college with that added bonus: a stack of student loans. While searching for the ultimate job, the last thing a student needs is worrying about how to pay off a ton of student loans.

Student Loan Consolidation in One Simple Payment

It would make life so much easier to pay one student loan bill instead of five, six, seven or even eight – sometimes more! After graduation there’s so much to think about: finding the ultimate job, finding a place to live, and figuring out how to pay for everything.

Thinking about paying monthly student loan bills certainly will not make life easy or happy. No one enjoys paying bills. The task becomes even worse and more stressful when there are piles of bills to pay. By consolidating student loans life will get easier and payments might be lower.

Fast Track to Student Loan Consolidation

Consolidation isn’t a foreign word and it’s not too big of a word to understand. Consolidation is easy. It combines all of a student’s loans into one payment. It’s that simple. It’s easy as pie and will let you breathe easier too. Student loan consolidation is convenient and allows you to combine all your loans. In addition, consolidation is no longer only geared toward federal loans. Now students also can consolidate their private loans.

The Time is Now for Student Loan Consolidation

There’s no time like the present to consolidate outstanding student loans. Even though interest rates on federal student loans were at their lowest from July 1, 2004 to July 1, 2005, it’s still a great time to combine student loans. The rates most likely will increase in July 2006, so consolidating now is a bright idea. Federal student loan consolidation can be as low as 4.75 percent. Private student loan consolidation depends on the lender, and the borrower’s credit.

Students who have multiple student loans oftentimes are inundated with varying interest rates and repayment terms. Getting it all in order every month can prove to be a literal nightmare.

 I have to hand it to the type of people who will go out of their way to find a bargain, even though it may seem like an extreme sometimes. They will drive all the way across town to save a penny a gallon on gas and tell me it is worth it. But those same people fall way short when it comes to really finding bargains, especially with bigger ticket items such as their car insurance quote. In fact, in most cases they cannot even tell me what their deductibles are for their coverages.

There is nothing wrong with being a bargain hunter, and perhaps more people should be like that. But if you are going to shop for the best prices on things, why not also include auto insurance in that same search? Yes, it’s a bit more difficult to understand how to compare insurance quotes but the money you can potentially save more than makes up for it.

Most consumers simply renew their policies every year and don’t pay much more attention to it than that. While that certainly saves time, it most certainly does not save money because car insurance rates are changing all the time, and your insurance company is unlikely to call and tell you that the cost of coverage was reduced, especially if you are happy to keep paying the inflated prices.

That is not to say that your current car insurance provider is charging you too much. They may in fact be providing you with the most aggressive rate policy possible with just enough coverage so that you are protected, yet not over-insured. The problem is that if you don’t comparison shop every year, you don’t know that for sure, do you?

Now RFID tags will come under the green blanket as they will be in the company of environment friendly green performance batteries. Here are the EnerChip family of thin-film battery devices which not only end the need of battery replacement but also offer superb performance which does not even harm the environment around you.

You have a bit of technical bent of mind along with tinkering abilities then you would surely like the RFID Experimentation Kit. People who feel that they do not have the qualities stated above need not worry as this kit is not even that complex that you can’t use it without garnering some basic knowledge on RFID. Probably this is one of the best kits to learn about RFID and you can get hold of the various aspects of RFID within the comforts of your house. This kit comes along with an RFID book which will impart you knowledge about various RFID projects such as RFID enabled safe, RFID door lock, RFID enabled Smart Shelf, RFID login to Windows XP and RFID employee Time Clock. So get ready to brush up your technical knowledge on RFID with this amazing RFID Experimentation Kit.

The RFID Experimentation Kit comprises of a host of things such as RFID reader, RFID Toys Book, USB cable and around twelve different varieties of RFID tags to keep you busy all day. Priced at $100, the kit as of now is out of stock and probably you will need to wait until the end of March to get hold of one. All you people who up till now wanted to get closer to RFID but couldn’t do so have a good opportunity to realize their dreams with the RFID Experimentation Kit. This kit would surely increase the awareness and popularity of the technology which seems to be embroiled in one controversy or the other. Probably I will order one for my geeky nephew today!!

How about defeating the purpose of counterfeiters with double edge protection? You people must be aware of the fact that holograms are used to discriminate between original and fake products and now Hitachi and Toppan have gone a step further and launched what they call world’s first hologram-toting IC tag which is a combo of hologram and RFID aimed at making counterfeiting more difficult.

Holograms cannot be faked without large scale facilities and RFID data is encrypted and quite secure which at the end of the day would be a tough nut to crack. The sticker cannot be peeled off the item in question without being broken into pieces.

So the next time you go off to buy some pretty expensive designer handbags or perfume you will be confident of the fact that you are not wasting your hard earned money on some fake product which can only be distinguished from the genuine product by an eagle’s eye. All thanks to Hitachi and Toppan for coming up with hologram-toting IC tag.

Recently the people at Hong Kong-based China Elite Technology sent me a copy of their white paper about “Smart Tokens” for ticketing in mass transit. Steven Wong, Product Development Director, writes:

“In this white paper we share what we learned developing a RFID token for single journey ticketing in mass transit. We have shipped millions of these Smart Tokens over the past 2 years and it appears that they have made good on their initial promise.

Most recently, the Guangzhou subway system ordered an additional 800,000 smart tokens. The commuter taps the contactless token on a turnstile to enter the subway system, then drops the token into a turnstile slot to open an exit gate when leaving, allowing transit operators to recover and reuse the coins. The tokens are designed to solve the problem of how to provide chip-based tickets for one-time or occasional transit riders without providing them with relatively expensive contactless smart cards. The tokens cost between 40 and 50 U.S. cents when customers order 1 million or more, with the price depending on the performance characteristics required of the chip.

The Guangzhou subway system has now ordered a total of 3.6 million tokens, and CET has sold 10 million tokens in all, mostly in China. The tokens come in three sizes, ranging from 25 to 35 millimeters in diameter, which makes the smallest token about the size of a 2-euro coin.

Some unusual and interesting topics discussed in the white paper include the impact of smart tokens on public health in the event of a contagious outbreak, and the possibility of re-useable advertising space on tickets.”

One of the things I found fascinating is on Page 9 of the white paper. It points out that in the future, advertisers may employ near field communications to enable interactive advertising on the tickets. Thus, a consumer’s mobile phone could be used to pick up advertising and messages from the token. What that means is that even the tickets will be talking to us! We are not that far away from the scenarios envisioned in the movie, Minority Report.

It is an interesting paper and well worth a read. Download the smart tokens white paper here (PDF).

There seems to be effort going around to give as much exposure as possible to RFID and in one such effort Technology Extension Service of the University of Maryland has unveiled an RFID assessment program for selected number of companies and that too without charging a single penny for it.

So what is University of Maryland offering? The university is offering an on site RFID assessment which would start off with a review of productivity of the company or issues related to security. After studying the conditions prevailing possible RFID solutions will be studied and suggestions offered through a report where expected costs and return on investment will be stated. RFID has been found out to improve efficiencies for a number of companies but keep in mind that it cannot be an answer for everything.