So, what’s the deal with RFID tags? Well, have you seen the Bond movies and such where an agent gets ‘tagged’ with a chip so that his overseers can track him around? That’s essentially what RFID tags are, without the Hollywood flair – hi-tech ways of tracking your inventory and reducing the chance of foul play. Barcodes are great for groceries, but for anything else, you might want to consider the effectiveness and options that RFID tagging provides.
How RFID tags work
Imagine the standard way of checking your business inventory: examining each item individually against a list and maybe even swiping them with a barcode checker. It sort of screams “time-consuming”, doesn’t it? A warehouse can have hundreds or even thousands of items, and every inventory check usually means a serious halt in the day-to-day operations.
RFID tags on your inventory make this process easy and quick and therefore help minimize the chances of lost or stolen property. In the absence of RFID tags, your inventory checks would take so long that you’d probably do one per month at best. Using an RFID scanner lets you check your workplace multiple times per week (or even daily) without any losses in productivity.
Running a rain gutter company requires you to have quite a bit of tools as well as materials on-hand and ready at all times. The larger the company, the more difficult it is to keep track of each of these instruments and materials. Not with RFID, though – a single scan of an area will quickly reveal if everything is in stock or if something went conspicuously missing.
There are several different types of RFID tags that facilitate different levels of mass-checking. In general, though, you can expect your RFID scanner to catch everything from 20 feet up to a hundred meters, regardless of the amount of tags.
What RFID tags can help you with
Running RFID checks often is one of the best ways of securing yourself against theft from employees or anyone else coming in contact with your items. We get it – having lots of equipment and work materials makes keeping tabs on them a nightmare. Even with security cameras, finding out who stole what can be extremely difficult because you have no way of knowing when the theft occurred.
Say an item gets stolen on the first day of an individual month while your scheduled check is on its last day. That’s 30 or so days of security footage you’d have to sift through in hopes of finding the culprit – definitely not anyone’s idea of a good time.
With RFID tags on every piece of your inventory, you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact time when a theft or misplacement occurred – in most cases, a few days are the most you can expect to be off. From here, you can easily check your workers’ shifts and the visitor log and find out exactly what happened.
This is also why the cost of getting RFID tags and a decent scanner pays off – it might act as an unwanted expense at first but will justify itself as soon as an item goes missing.