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The usage of RFID tags has been picking up speed for a number of years, but 2010 has increased proliferation for three key reasons: 1] cheaper equipment and tags, 2] increased dependability and performance (up to 99.9% accurate now); 3] the agreement of an international standard for UHF passive tags.

Cost has always been a prohibiting factor, but a Korean company has declared that it will have passive RFID tags for sale for about three US cents each by the closing stages of 2011

Historically, the biggest user of RFID tags was and still is the US Department of Defense. The armed forces use smart tags to trace the containers of their hardware and sometimes individual articles of hardware too. The aviation industry has also been using them worldwide for a long time.

The latest industries to discover a use for the passive tags are financial services for IT asset tracking and health care, where more than 60% of the top medical apparatus companies are using passive UHF RFID in 2010.

Companies that have not come up with a dependable system to track their stock and know exactly what they have of everything that they sell are apt to carry surplus levels of stock to ensure they can fulfill their customers’ requirements.

If you can reduce excess stock by using improved information, you can: trim down investment, storage space, labour costs; and increase asset utilization, increase stock turnover, facilitate faster billing cycles, all of which will significantly contribute to cash flow.

In short, the usage of RFID:

1] Eases stock control and item location in real time, which cuts product search time, reduces inventory levels and improves control of the manufacturing process. 2] Enhances compliance, enhances work-in-progress (WIP) productivity and cuts the cost of the finished goods. 3] Enables the real-time monitoring of production, order completion, and distribution procedures and their level of effectiveness. 4] Enhances profitably and ability to meet demand quickly and lowers inventory costs. 5] Reduces labour costs by eliminating manual procedures. 6] Improves order and shipping accuracy by helping to make sure that orders are dispatched complete, error-free, and on time, which thereby raises customer satisfaction and the probability of repeat orders. 7] Provides extremely accurate real-time data capture by means of warehouse management systems (WMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

The way forward is to begin with the goods-in bay. Goods come in with shipping labels, but they are often inadequate in quality and information. It would be best to make a new ‘identity badge’ for all items received at this point. All the pertinent information that you have on the items delivered can be put of an RFID tag and attached to the pallet, the crate or even the goods themselves.

Now these articles can be added to stock and the computer will always be able to divulge what the goods are in the box, how many of them there are and where they are located in the storehouse.

The simple procedure of creating an RFID tag at the unloading bay and attaching it to the goods received can save hours of time wasted checking up on stock levels and thousands of dollars wasted in overstocking.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on several topics, but is currently concerned with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

In order to demonstrate how RFID tags can greatly sway the fortunes of a business for the better, we can look at a hypothetical case below. Let us take the example of a furniture maker specializing in the supply furniture to a hotel group.

This may sound like an example with no relevance to normal small businesses, but in fact, hotel chains are extremely choosy and have no loyalty, so if you can please these people, you can please anyone.

The main requirements of the hotel chain are that orders are met and on time, the quality of the supplier’s products has already been considered to be sufficient by means of enforced ISO 9000 quality control and factory visits.

The hotel furniture manufacturer decides to introduce passive RFID tags to follow its items from the point of manufacture to the point of delivery, that is the hotel or its storage area.

Under previous conditions the manufacturer had employed a couple of people to walk around with bar code readers and clip boards carrying out quality control and tracking the completion of orders.

The problem was that the arrangement was still subject to human error and items still went missing, which resulted in management compensating by over manufacturing and over stocking ‘just in case’.

That is a common enough phenomenon., but the difficulties are multiplied when you think of all the separate items of furniture that are implicated in a hotel room, bathroom or lobby and if they are stored in a 200,000 square foot warehouse. Items get lost, forklift drivers make errors, people forget to fill in inventory forms, get sick and take holidays.

In short, running a warehouse like this is a nightmare with too much stress on key employees. It sometimes leads to imperfect deliveries or worse, incomplete delivery tickets. Sometimes the order might be complete but the hotel would think it was not because the delivery ticket was incorrect.

If this company were to initiate RFID asset control they could affix an RFID tag to completed sticks of furniture. The tag would say where it is, what it is, whom it is for, when it has to be delivered and what else makes up part of the order. The tag is being read continuously by the warehouse’s RFID readers forewarning when orders are running late or are still incomplete.

Not only that but the tag can say what else has to be made and whether the object itself has passed quality control. It can also say which defects someone has found with it. In short, instead of a couple of people traipsing around the stockroom hoping that they have covered everything, you could have radio sensors reading every tag in a warehouse the size of a soccer pitch, reporting back to a central computer where the storehouse manager can have access to real time intelligence, not just the state of affairs at close of business the day before.

This should enhance the manager’s chance to manage, cut down on waste, ensure complete orders delivered on time and so higher levels of customer satisfaction, which should lead to more repeat orders.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is currently involved with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

RFID is the recognized acronym for Radio Frequency IDentification. The basis of RFID technology is that every RFID chip or tag is capable of sending a radio signal on a frequency wholly unique to itself.

Therefore, every RFID tag must have its own identifying frequency and the RFID tag readers must be sensitive enough to be able to distinguish between frequencies that are only a very minute bit different from its neighbouring tags. The disparity can be microscopic.

Therefore, the technology has to be sensitive and selective, but not delicate, because the apparatus has to be used on the shop floor and by people who are often in a hurry and in weather that may be inclement.

In order for RFID to work, you need a tag, which is an upmarket kind of bar code and a radio receiver, often called a (tag) reader. However, whereas a bar code can only hold a small amount of information and the bar code reader has to be pointed at it, an RFID tag can store much more information and can be read from a hundred yards or more – even out of line of sight.

Passive tags will only reveal their details when asked to by a reader, whereas an active tag is constantly relaying its contents. Clearly, active RFID tags are more costly than passive tags, because they require a long life battery.

These tags can be utilized to track items from the moment they leave the manufacturer of the goods they describe to the in-bay of the vendor. The tags can then be up-dated or replaced and stored in the warehouse. Once there, RFID readers can keep management informed about what goods are where and if the sell-by-date is impending.

This has implications for the amount of stock that a business needs to hold, the amount of goods sold cheap because the sell-by-date is too near and for theft, all of which should increase company profits more than paying for the cost of the tags, the readers, the printers and the software.

At the click of a mouse, managers will be able to read how much inventory they have in real time and if this is all linked to the checkout cash registers, which are the most and least profitable items. This makes reordering easy . Easy to the point of automation. For instance, when stocks of the top ten percent of the best selling items falls below 1,000 order 10,000 more. Automatically, no questions asked.

RFID has many other applications too. The ideas mentioned above can be applied to farm animals, a call centre’s IT hardware, a fleet of commercial vehicles, an record of household items, your pets, your car and even your garden furniture. Some people who work over a border are even having them put under their skin so that they do not have to wait at customs.

And do not forget that criminals on early discharge are also tagged. It is the same technology.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several topics, but is currently involved with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

The majority of of the newer outlets and the bigger chain stores use RFID cash registers. RFID cash registers are hooked up to an RFID reader which is used to scan the article being bought to obtain the price, record the sale and control the stock. This method of recording the sale makes it quicker at the check out. It also reduces the human error factor.

Radio Frequency Identification or RFID is similar to utilizing bar codes but they can hold a lot more information and they are usually not taken off after purchase, because passive RFID tags can be really small and can be put under labels on cans of food or sewn into clothing at the point of manufacture. Every tag responds in a different frequency, so the items in a shopping trolley do not even have to be removed to be counted, which is the not the situation with bar codes.

It is unlikely that bar codes will disappear any time soon because they are so commonly used, but the fate of bar codes is surely sealed. They will be supplanted. Bar code readers are hand-held, but RFID readers can be in a fixed place, scanning the shopping trolley from about a metre away.

RFID cash registers are bad news for check out clerks, because they can operate far more quickly than conventional cash registers. You will not need to unload items and check out clerks will not have to hold every item and punch in the prices, so there will be no mistakes either.

In the future, stores will only have to have check out clerks for patrons who wish to pay in cash. Most people pay with a credit or debit card nowadays, so all you would need is a RFID cash register and a credit card swiper so that the customers can pay.

A superstore that now provides twenty points of sale with twenty check out clerks, could have eighteen RFID cash registers for those with credit cards and two traditional cash registers for customers paying with cash.

In fact, because RFID cash registers are so much faster, the superstore could most likely do away with five of those points of sale as well without any reduction in service or quality to the clientele.

For the merchant, the cost of installing RFID cash registers is not insubstantial, but the costs will be recovered pretty swiftly by the reduction in wages.

RFID cash registers offer higher levels of stock control than bar code readers because the RFID tag can hold a lot more information than a bar code. Stock control is clearly important, because a merchant neither wants to run out of an article nor have too many of an article tying up money.

RFID cash registers, linked to a computer, can automatically show you which products are selling the most and which items are producing the most profit for you. This makes it simple to order more of the goods at the top of the list and fewer of the items at the bottom.

In fact, even ordering could be automated according to a pre-programmed algorithm. The only possible drawback with RFID cash registers is an interruption in the power supply., but you could reduce that problem by having a support generator.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is now involved with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

All RFID tags are used to store and ultimately send data. They can best be thought of as the replacement for the bar code. However, they have significant advantages over bar codes. For instance: RFID tags can hold much more data than bar codes; they can be scanned from further away and they can in point of fact send data, not only store data.

There are three varieties of RFID tags: passive, active and hybrid. Passive RFID tags are the least expensive, because they are less complicated. They need to be asked to divulge their data by taking power from an RFID reader. When the reader’s radio waves hit them, they echo back their data. This is the sort of tag used in goods in a retail outlet or on crates in a warehouse.

On the other hand, active RFID tags have a battery, a transmitter and an aerial so that they are always transmitting. These devices are obviously a lot more expensive and so are used only on more expensive items such as a container, a battle tank, an aircraft, on criminals ankle bands or on an animal of an endangered species.

The hybrid RFID tag is capable of transmitting, but it needs to be told to transmit; it has to be turned on by a signal. This signal could be a satellite passing over head. These hybrid RFID tags are also expensive, but the battery lasts longer because they are not ‘always on’. These tags have the same uses as the active tags, but are appropriate for use where it is not critical to know where something is every minute of the day: for instance cattle in a field or goats on a mountain.

Passive tags can be attached permanently by sewing them into linings or putting them under skin because they do not have their own power source and do not wear out. This is a cause of anxiety to some people who worry about an invasion of their privacy or the erosion of their human rights.

Active and hybrid tags are most often clearly visible so that the batteries can be changed as and when necessary. If this is going to be not likely to take place, as in the case of wild animals, the tag can have a biodegradable fastener which will break sometime after the expected expiry of the battery.

Some uses for RFID tags are on season tickets so that the owner can pass through the style more quickly than a customer paying by cash. It has applications in security; most of the ID badges you see pinned to shirts have RFID built into them so that security guards do not have to stop and query everybody.

They can be put into trucks that repeatedly cross frontiers so that they do not have to stop for identification. They can be placed on windscreens so that, as you drive through a motorway toll post, either your credit card is debited or the charge is added to your company’s monthly account.

Hospitals utilize them on patients so that they do not lose anyone or misidentify them. RFID tags are helpful in our daily lives but people are concerned about criminals being able to read all this information too readily as well.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several topics, but is now involved with the RFID asset tracking. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

How does one go about taking care of one’s property – one’s worldly possessions? Well, the majority of people put their money in the bank, put the jewellery in a safe and insure the rest. But insurance is not really taking care of your possessions, is it? It is taking care of yourself so that you do not have renew them with your own money.

In the old days, and even now, I suppose in some places, you would hire a boy to watch over your sheep or cattle or bring them in at night for fear of big cats, wolves or thieves. These were an early kind of security guard and indeed wealthy people had and often still do have personal body guards.

What if you had a large office with a hundred laptop computers – laptops because employees had to do field work too? How would you keep track on all those? A car is another good case in point and construction site machinery is being stolen all the time even from under the noses of (or with the help of) private security firms.

So what can you do? Get dogs? That works sometimes, but they can be poisoned. Get video cameras and passive infra-red movement sensors linked to a control centre? That works and many firms and private houses have it, but it is very expensive.

As a low-priced alternative, the police were giving out free pens in the UK, which wrote in invisible ink. The idea was to write your postcode and house number. This ink became visible under a certain kind of light. That is all very well if you have a suspect or found goods.

Bar codes are not realistic, the pen is better. It all comes back to insurance or security.

However, there is another technique that is becoming affordable. The concept has been around for about 85 years, but it was too expensive to use on anything less significant than an airplane or a battle tank.

I am talking about radio frequency identification or RFID for short. The idea is the same one that aircraft have been using since during the Second World War – a transponder emits precoded information in answer to a demand from an RF reader.

Details regarding ownership and details of what the item is can be written to an RFID chip also known as a tag and the tag can then be taped inside the item that it is to safeguard.

There are two varieties of tag: the passive and the active. Passive tags will only respond if information is requested by a reader, whereas an active tag is always broadcasting.

Many business people use RFID tagging to keep track of their assets. In the case of farm animals, most cattle are tagged these days. Most big offices have their IT devices tagged as well and we all know that clothing stores have been tagging clothes for years, although perhaps you did not realize what that button was that they were removing at the till.

People are already tagging their dogs, cats and cars and it will not be long before these asset management routines will be employed extensively at home too. Insurance companies may insist on it.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on several topics, but is currently concerned with the RFID asset management. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.