For at least a couple of decades now, RFID tracking has been improving our lives behind the scenes. It ensures that perishable foods are properly handled in transit, for example, and an inert RFID tracking tag can even reunite you with a lost pet.Â
RFID asset tracking can have huge payoffs for your business, too. You can get real-time data about your assets, reduce the possibility of human error in asset management, keep employees accountable, and more. Here’s what RFID can do for your business processes.
Know More About Your Assets Than Ever
You need to know as much as you can about your assets, especially if you’re operating on tight profit margins. The better you’re able to keep track of your assets, and the more transparency you can get as far as what happens to them when they’re out of your sight, the more you can get out of those assets.
You can use RFID asset tracking to monitor your fleet vehicles as they go out into the world every day, traveling around your city or going even further afield. Use RFID tags to track maintenance schedules for your fleet vehicles or other company equipment, to prevent breakdowns and save money. Track which assets are nearing the end of their lifecycle and will soon require replacement. Acquire, service, and dispose of assets on an optimized cycle.
Prevent Mistakes
No matter what kind of business you’re in, your employees are going to make mistakes sometimes. Even you will make mistakes sometimes, believe it or not. And there’s no way you can prevent every mistake. But you can take steps to protect yourself and your employees from, well, yourselves.
If you’re using a manual asset tracking system, you might as well be asking your employees to make mistakes. Sure, they might be as careful and diligent as they can, but those qualities come to the fore to varying extents in different people. When you rely on human beings to keep an accurate record of tasks performed, or to keep track of inventory, or to correctly onboard and offload shipments, you’re relying on a system that’s inherently flawed. People will make mistakes and those mistakes will cost time and money. RFID asset tracking ensures that important data is always accurate.
Foster Accountability
When you’re using RFID tracking to manage your assets, you’ll always know who was last responsible for that item. Just knowing that you’re keeping an eye on their interactions with assets will help employees be more responsible and take more accountability for what happens to those assets under their watch. Internal inventory shrinkage will go down when products are managed using RFID tags, and people will behave better with your vehicles and equipment when they know they’ll be held responsible for anything that happens to those assets under their care.
Boost Productivity
The time savings alone from using RFID asset tracking can drastically boost employees productivity. Employees won’t be bogged down in tedious manual tasks, like manually checking in warehouse shipments or manually recording maintenance and task records. They’ll be able to get those tasks done in just a few seconds, because RFID readers don’t even need to be in line of sight with the tags in order to detect them and display the information they contain. They can even read many tags at once. You’ll save your employees the boredom and the time that it takes to count everything manually, or record maintenance cycles or other important task information. They’ll be happier and more productive as a result.
With the time saved by using RFID tags to manage your assets, employees can focus more on the kinds of tasks that can’t be automated with a microchip and a radio frequency sensor. Maybe they can spend more time building customer relationships, designing promotional materials, or strengthening vendor and client relationships. You can shave hours off of the time required to complete some of what were formerly the most labor-intensive chores, and that will free up plenty of time for employees to do more important things.
And you might even be able to save some money by operating with fewer employees. When it only takes one person a few minutes with a scanner to onboard a new shipment of inventory, for example, you can save yourself the expense of hiring a whole team to do it.
RFID asset management looks like it’s here to stay — and it’s probably going to be even more ubiquitous now that the technology is so inexpensive. Use RFID tags to manage your company’s assets, so you can ditch the tedious tasks and run a tighter ship.
