You never know when a natural disaster might occur, or a pandemic might strike, or other disruptive events that you will never see coming. An RFID asset tracking system will help keep you prepared. Having your assets in top-performing condition is vital to your response time, capacity, and helping customers or patients when desperately needed, especially if you are in the medical or restoration industries.
Assets are important to the operational success of every company. If you run into a shortage of assets or you have more assets that are disposed, lost, in maintenance or checked out of your facility, the amount of available assets could be considerably less than what you thought which leads to delayed responses, lost revenue, and unexpected purchases to keep operations running smoothly. Of course, this is without the proper asset tracking system in place.
Asset inventory is a critical business practice that is becoming easier than ever to monitor, maintain, and keep accurate asset records of all your vital assets throughout the entire organization so you can make the proper business decisions to react.
A couple of key items to make an RFID asset tracking system more efficient for your business:
- RFID Technology – being able to scan your assets in minutes rather than hours, days, or weeks will consistently give you accurate records of assets that are available and the location where they exist. To learn more, check out 5 Benefits of RFID Asset Tracking.
- Cloud-Based / Mobile – allowing sub-users to scan and update assets in the field that automatically updates via the cloud to ensure increased accuracy and data reporting.
Schedule a discovery call or 30-minute live demo with Grey Trunk RFID to learn more.
Here are some steps you can take to ensure your assets are always available when you need them at the most critical times:
1. Schedule Preventative Asset Maintenance
Just like an automobile needs its oil changed every 3000-6000 miles to keep the engine running peak performance, your assets must have preventative maintenance performed to keep your assets running at peak conditions. Some assets might need to be maintained weekly, other assets could be yearly depending on use. Utilizing a maintenance calendar to keep track of when these are scheduled will hold you accountable to perform the maintenance and the calendar also keeps you organized.
Falling in the same lines as preventative maintenance, scheduling calibration is important for many industries, specifically hospitals or medical device companies. Knowing that the biomedical equipment has been calibrated recently gives you peace of mind that you are providing patients with precise and accurate reads. The health and safety of patients rely on calibrated equipment.
2. Routine Asset Inventories
The days of tracking asset inventory on an Excel sheet are over. With RFID, you can increase the efficiency of asset inventories by scanning multiple items at once that are within range of the RFID tag.
Example: You walk into a room that has 100 assets to perform an inventory to make sure all 100 assets are still accounted for.
The process before RFID would like this:
- Find the specific piece of equipment, and check off on your Excel sheet that you have found it and then go update your Excel OR find the barcode associated to the asset and scan them one by one until you record all the assets in the room, hoping that you scanned 100 assets.
With RFID, it would look like this:
- Walk into the room and start scanning with RFID and capture all RFID assets, within range, in seconds. Software, such as Grey Trunk RFID, will then tell you how many assets you scanned and break it down into a report that tells you:
- Found assets
- Missing assets
- Misplaced assets
- New assets
What if your hospital has 350 beds but only 320 available infusion pumps? Would that cause issues for your operations? Being short 30 infusion pumps could affect patient health if your hospital is at capacity.
Because employees can perform asset inventories more efficiently, your assets records are going to be up to date. This will consistently give you the necessary information and data to make informed business decisions.
3. Perform Check-In / Check-Out
Some assets are portable and are often moving from room to room, warehouse to a job site, or school to home. Knowing when these assets leave your facility and where they are going / who they are assigned to will help you hold employees or students responsible for the assets.
With a check-in / check-out RFID asset tracking system, you can easily record when an asset leaves the facility giving you an accurate count of how many assets you have available at specific locations throughout your entire organization.
Having this information readily available allows you to reach out to the people responsible for the devices to make sure they are returned in proper working condition.
Summary
Never be caught off guard again from circumstances that are out of your control. The best companies will prepare for emergencies and knowing what you have available for assets to combat those emergencies will help with response times, customer support, and give your company or reputable brand for being prepared in emergencies.
Pandemics are rare.
Natural Disasters are rare.
Having your vital assets readily available shouldn’t be rare.
If you are needing to implement an asset tracking system or you need a more efficient way to track and maintain your assets, schedule a discovery call or a 30-minute demo with the Grey Trunk RFID team.
