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Automated Asset Utilization & Tracking
Automated Asset Utilization & Tracking
Automated Asset Utilization & Tracking
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Welcome to our Automated Asset Utilization and Tracking Webinar this morning. I'd like to thank you for taking the time to listen to our presentation. My name is Kari Brock. I'm the VP of Sales for a company called GuardRFID, and we specialize in active RFID technology for tracking assets and people. Today we're going to cover off some background on Guard. We're going to cover RFID technology, trends in the marketplace, some case studies, overview of our solutions, our technology, discuss an ROI example and how you can get benefit from a system for your business, and then if there's any questions at the end, we'll take those, and also I'll leave my contact information, and if you'd like to get in touch for more information, talk to one of our folks in the sales department or technology department or schedule a demo, we'd be happy to do that for you. GuardRFID was founded in 2007. Our CEO and our CTO, our Chief Technology Officer, are two of the original founders of the company, and they're still with us today, 11 years later. In that time, we've developed and built over 400 systems that are in the marketplace, many of them, the original systems, still out there today. They're very robust and last a very long time. GuardRFID's technology provides proximity and RTOS within one system, and I'll explain that in more detail as we go along. We have several industrial solutions. We have a personnel accountability system, a mustering solution. We do real-time asset tracking, yard management, and hands-free access control. This is a sampling of some of our customers, both in North America and worldwide. At the top, you'll see several industrial customers and also healthcare customers. Our business started for us predominantly in the healthcare space. Healthcare hospitals have used RFID technology for a couple of decades now. Started with interesting solutions, such as tracking wandering patients and infant security to avoid abductions of infants, and about three years ago, we expanded into the industrial and commercial space, and we're seeing a huge uptake in those markets for active RFID technology. You may have heard of the Internet of Things. That's the ability to connect devices and machines to the Internet and get feedback from them. There's applications for both the consumer and the industrial markets, and we'll talk a little bit more about that, but lately, heavy machinery, transportation, you'll hear of people creating things like smart office buildings, smart cities, smart hospitals. All of that has to do with the connectivity of devices and machines back to the Internet to receive data back and forth from these machines, and it's the same thing in your house where you might have installed now a camera when your doorbell rings or a thermostat that you can remotely adjust being away from your home or lights that you can turn on and off in your home. There's also things like smart fridges and other appliances that also can be monitored or all part of home automation, TVs, smart TVs, phones, of course, and tablets, and different wearable devices, and on the industrial side, you'll find things like people are tracking vehicles, people, access into buildings, feedback from machines, temperature readings, really anything that the machine can output can be picked up and recorded. What is RFID? RFID is a radio frequency identification. It's a technology that uses radio waves in an electromagnetic spectrum to transmit signals between a transponder and a reader. Essentially, that tag or that button is giving information out at a set interval, and a reader picks that up. RFID devices will pick up that information that's in those radio waves, and once that's received, it'll transmit that back with the location and the identification back to a central hub or a supervisory station or to a tablet or to a smartphone. RFID allows a business to identify, track, locate, and secure its assets and people. The benefits of RFID, there's many. They can impact your productivity. It can increase your revenue. It can lower your cost of operating. It may be involved in regulatory or a compliance issue depending on what industry you're in. It can offer you better security. It can give you accurate and more relevant reporting and information, and it can shorten up the process and improve your data quality and keeping things in real time. There are two main types of RFID technology, and sometimes this is where people confuse things. Passive RFID is exactly that. It's passive, so the tag must pass by a reader in order for it to be read, or you must walk around with a handheld reader going to the tags to get the information. You'll see passive RFID is used extensively in the retail industry, so if you've ever walked out of a clothing store and the alarm has sounded, that's because the RFID tag hasn't been demagnetized and you've set off the security. The other place you'll see RFID used extensively is in warehouses, inventory, e-commerce applications. If somebody's doing an inventory count in a grocery store or in a warehouse, they'll be walking up and down the aisles with a handheld reader, and they're scanning for the RFID tags or they're scanning barcodes. Those are very effective systems for applications where you have the time to go to the item and find it, and these are very low-cost tags. These tags can cost pennies and they can be printed on your own printer and affixed to your items, but there are limitations to this because these tags are passive. They simply don't tell you where they are. The advantage of an active RFID tag, this tag is a larger tag and it has a battery in it and an antenna, and what it is doing is it is beaconing and telling the reader and telling your system where it is. It'll also tell you if it's been moved. It'll tell you if somebody's tampering with the tag, so this is a far more complex system, but it gives you several more advantages. Generally, you use active RFID for two reasons. One, the value of the assets is high, and two, you need to know where they are at any given time. A couple other benefits to active RFID that I should mention is they're also much longer range. With passive, you must be in extremely close proximity to pick up and read that tag. Where active RFID, as I mentioned, has an antenna and it's beaconing, you can pick up that signal up to 300 feet away, especially if you're located in an outdoor space. The readers are relatively low cost in active RFID, in many cases less expensive than passive readers. We do have both technologies. There's a large amount of data that can be processed. You can read thousands of tags, active RFID tags, simultaneously. It gives you around-the-clock monitoring. This is, as I mentioned, it's always on, and the tag is always beaconing, saying, I'm right here. This is where I'm located, or I am on the move. They have a high level of tamper detection, and they have sensing capability, so these tags can pick up temperature. They can sense light. They can sense movement. We have tags for people that can sense somebody has fallen. This gives you higher security features. For example, if you had all your heavy equipment in your yard with a tag on it, and after midnight, somebody starts moving a bulldozer, where you could have the system alert you and send out an alarm or sound an alarm. You can also interface these, and I'll talk about this in a little bit, to security cameras and other things, visual alarms, lights. It's a very good theft deterrent. As I mentioned, we do sell passive as well. You could use a combination of passive to manage inventory parts for your maintenance and repair business or warranty business, and then you could have active tags on the actual pieces of equipment and all the attachments, for example, in your yard. I want to talk a little bit about a case study. Sender Industrial Machinery is a Komatsu dealer located in ... They have multiple locations. They have 10 locations with us in Florida, Carolinas, and in Georgia, and they have all of their equipment tagged and all their accessories. They have about 4,600 pieces of equipment tagged right now, and they monitor everything in real time and get some huge advantages. Rather than me telling you a little bit more about it, I'm going to share a video with you right now, and you can hear directly from them. At Guard RFID, we build active RFID solutions that help our clients track what matters by locating, identifying, securing their people and assets. At Linder Industrial Machinery, they were looking for a better way to track their accessories and equipment. We started off looking at the RFID programs to monitor our current fleet and keep control of equipment that's coming and going, and also to do inventory quicker. The other thing that we're trying to do is maintain some metrics, develop those, and reduce the time that it takes for a machine, when it comes off a rent, to be turned around and ready to go back out. And with the RFID, we know exactly when it comes onto the yard and then when it actually leaves. And then with our e-inspection program, we use that to do check-ins and check-outs, take photos, and it uploads into our accounting system. So we actually receive information into the Guard system concerning if something's authorized to be leaving the yard, and then we receive information back into the accounting system to tell us that stuff has come in. So some of our yards are fairly large, so the ActiveTag sends out a signal so we can actually ping the yard and it will tell us what's physically sitting on the yard. But now we can give the yard workers a precise location as to where they should be looking. It's helped us also with knowing that stuff has come back that may have fallen through the cracks. If somebody does a drop-off of equipment at night and it doesn't get checked in, we're able to determine the next day on an error report that it's been received, but a check-in hasn't been completed. So it's allowing us to have a better control of our inventory and fixed assets. There's a reader and there's the exciter. Basically, the exciter is what we use at the gates. So we have four exciters set up at the gates so we can track coming and going. So we know that it's going to hit a particular exciter first when it's leaving, and then of course the reverse when something's coming back. It's going to hit the one on the outside first. So we can determine in and out movements. The readers are positioned throughout the yard, so they basically are communicating with the actual tags to tell us where they're actually located. We looked at a few different providers. One of the things with Guard was they've actually done the heavy equipment industry before, and we felt comfortable with their solution. The software is very straightforward, easy to use, and works on all the platforms that we use. We also use that for monitoring the readers and the exciters at the gate to determine their health. So we receive alerts, and then we can go and we can see exactly which one needs to be addressed. It'll give us information about tags. If a tag's battery is low, it'll give us that tag and the equipment number. And our yard workers can type in the equipment number or serial number, and it'll actually show them the same map that we have on our desktop. So while they're out there, they can look something up. So they're not having to go back in to try to locate things. We send probably more information than we thought we were initially going to do to the Guard software because the alert system was already developed. So we really rely upon that to send out emails to different groups to notify the key personnel as to what's going on with the equipment on the yard. A lot of our facilities, because of the size, there's not an availability or it's not as cost-effective to have power run all over the yard. So with the use of the solar panels and a battery, we're able to place the readers and exciters wherever we deem that we need to have those. So that really saved us quite a bit of cost. All the hardware and solar panels all came from Guard. I believe out of the 1,600 tags that we've put out there, we've maybe had four that we've had to replace due to a damage. That was one of the big concerns when we started the project was because of the environment that we're in, things tend to get damaged. So we've been really, really happy with it. At Guard RFID, we customize our solutions for any environment. Let's talk about how we can track your people and assets. So thanks for watching that video. I think you get a very good sense from Eric and from the team at Linder how they've really embraced using this system. They've had it in the field live and deployed for the last 18 months, so they've had a really good chance to measure the ROI on this system. I'd be happy to talk in more detail a little later on in the presentation about some of the ways to measure your investment and your return on it. This is a quote from the president and CEO, John Coughlin, at Linder. They have been measuring this. They have realized a significant cost savings even just after a few months of using the system, which is really encouraging. I think there's many other businesses out there that could benefit just as Linder has. Some of the major factors that are driving the RFID market up, and you'll see the light green section at the very top, is the active RTLS systems. Then there's passive and then passive tags. There's several sections of this market. It's about a $13 billion industry. One of the reasons that it's on the growth is in all areas of RFID, not just active RFID, is that there's more need for security, tracking, access control. What's interesting is we have some customers on the commercial and industrial side that have come to us, and their customers have asked what kind of systems that they have in place for security. Another example is we have a customer that stores copper coils, copper wire used for telecommunications. They store millions of dollars of copper wire on behalf of a large telephone company. It's the telephone company that insisted that they have a secondary security system beyond cameras and locked gates, but also have a way to monitor their inventory and know where everything was. That's why they installed our system several years ago, and it's been very successful for them. This is another case study that I think is also worth noting where the Bluebird bus company in Georgia has come up with a really unique application. They are one of the largest manufacturers of school buses. I'm sure you've seen their yellow buses driving in your neighborhood. They have a very large facility, 40 acres, probably larger than most heavy equipment yards. Most of those folks we talked to with heavy equipment yards tend to be between 2 and 12 acres, but this is a 40-acre facility where they have thousands of buses. One of the challenges they had was finding the right bus and ensuring that they shipped the right bus to the right customer. Because they're all yellow, it becomes a little bit of a challenge of making sure you found the right one, a little bit of a needle in a haystack. What they've done is they're using both a long-range RPLS, which is a real-time location, and they also use portal detection at the gates. What that means is you could do the same thing with your heavy equipment. Before something goes out of your gate, an alarm will sound, and somebody can check paperwork. If you do a lot of rentals, one of the complaints we hear in your industry is that a piece of equipment goes out with a few attachments or accessories, and sometimes it doesn't come back. It might go out with two or three, and it comes back with one less. Nobody's really checking this, or somebody has forgotten to put on the paperwork the additional attachments, and so you're losing rental income. Either way, whether you lose the attachment or the accessory, or whether you're not collecting the rental income, both are a challenge. If you look at this Bluebird bus video, while you guys aren't in the business of building buses, you'll see some interesting ideas. One of the other things that Bluebird is going to expand the system this year, they've had this in place for the last 20 months, and they're going to start tool tracking as well. They have a lot of tools that go missing and get misplaced. They often buy new tools only to find them later. This is a cost containment and to deter any theft of tools and people leaving them in areas and not realizing where they've left them. Let's watch this video now. At Guard RFID, we build active RFID solutions that help organizations track what matters by locating, identifying, securing your people and assets. The Bluebird Bus Corporation approached us with a challenge in being able to quickly and accurately locate their buses. One of the benefits of tracking these buses when they're drivable is being able to find them quicker. Sometimes we'd spend two hours, sometimes a whole day trying to find a particular bus. We had one time when we had some people wanting to look for a particular bus. They looked all over, couldn't find it. They got into a bus, drove around, couldn't find it, got out of the bus and realized the bus they were in was the one they were looking for. So now when the body's mounted to the chassis and when we drive it out of the building for the first time, we put a tag in it. Then we're able to find the bus based on that tag. The offline manufacturing processes is where we tag the buses and track them. Our normal production process, it's a captive line so we don't need to tag anything at that point. But once it's drivable and someone can park it where we don't know, it's very valuable to us. GuardRFID understood what our problems were and they were very helpful in getting us set up. They actually developed some applications just for us for our requirements. One of the applications that GuardRFID set up for us was we wanted to be able to drive a golf cart around, having it look for a specific bus so that when we drove past the bus, it would tell us, hey, you just drove past it. So this was to install a reader and an exciter on the golf cart and we've also added an iPad onto the golf cart so they can look up the bus and see where it is. The tags have magnets in them, and they're very durable, so we just stick it to the inside of the bus near the entrance door. We have a big lot, and there are certain areas that we don't have electrical power, and we definitely don't have internet cabling run to, and the expense to do that would have been so large that the solar-powered readers were a perfect solution for us. So I want to find a particular bus, so I just have to put in a partial number. My list gets smaller, I check it, and now I know where it's at. So one of the benefits of Garderoff ID is access control. So we want to take the tag out. So at the truck gate, when the bus leaves to go to the dealer, there's an alarm system that has a flashing light and an audible alarm, and it tells the guard, hey, make sure you take this tag out of the bus, because somebody left it in. So our future plan is to integrate the data from the Garderoff ID system into our production data and allow us to better coordinate finishing buses on time for the customer. Recommending Garderoff ID for manufacturing, anybody who has large assets, it's very helpful for. We have an issue in that our assets are basically a metal box, and radio frequencies inside a metal box don't work real well, but Garderoff ID has been a very good solution for us. At Garderoff ID, we customize our solutions for any environment. Let's talk about how we can track your people and assets. Well, I hope you enjoyed that video as well, and as you can see, they've made some interesting adjustments to the system where they've created their own bus finder, and they have a golf cart that allows them to zip all over their property and find buses very quickly. You'll notice they focused in a little bit in that video on the gates, where they have the audible alarms that somebody's checking paperwork to ensure that the right bus is going out. It's supposed to be shipped to a customer. You could do the exact same thing on rental, and you'll also notice the map, when he's showing the software, the software can be used in an app, a tablet, or on a computer, or on a laptop. You see the map of their property, so we'll take your floor plan, or your yard, or your map of your outdoor area, and create that right into the software, so you're looking at your own facility, and you'll see on this comment back from Matt, who is the engineering specialist at Bluebird, you know it's working well when people come to you and thank you for installing it, because it made their job easier. They had a full-time person that just did nothing but run around looking for buses, so not only did they save on that overhead and not require that person any longer, they were able to redeploy that employee to do something far more interesting than running around looking for buses all day long. For our technology, let's talk a little bit about how this works. Real-time location and portal detection, I've mentioned this, you've seen some of this in the video now. It's all in a single system. How this works is you set up a series of readers and exciters and tags, so you put tags on any item or person that you want to be able to locate instantly. These tags beacon every 12 seconds to tell you where they're located, and when they're not moving, they go into a sleep mode and they beacon every 10 minutes. That saves on the battery life. The readers are spread out across the area that you want to cover, and exciters are located at gates. Exciters instantly wake up tags and allow you to know the direction of something, so we can tell you whether a piece of equipment came into your yard or left your yard. When we talk about yard management, the Active RFID system will secure all your equipment. If some people have theft issues, other people don't, you can use it to detect movement of your goods after hours or unauthorized movement of something into another area or out of your facility altogether. There's different types of alerting features. As you saw in that Bluebird video, there's a light flashing, there's a sounder beeping, so you know something's on the move or trying to leave the yard. The tag that we've created that you see in the Linder video, there's putting onto the side of the bucket on the piece of equipment. What they've done is they've welded a metal shroud around it to protect the tag even further. That tag is virtually indestructible. It lasts up to six years. We call it the hockey puck. We're Canadian, so that's why we call it the hockey puck, but that tag is incredibly durable. We've had people smash them with five-pound hammers and can't break them. They're completely waterproof. It's the most durable tag in the market. It can be epoxied on, it can be bolted on, and it also has got a magnet in it, so if you want to be able to easily take it on and off of equipment or on the top of a cab of a piece of equipment, it's really easy to take on and off. This enhances your safety, gives you great benefits on inventory management. Many people have to walk their yard, do their inventory weekly or monthly, where you may have to go out there looking for a piece of equipment. Simply go into the AllGuard software, you'll be able to find whatever piece of equipment you're looking for. This is also very beneficial if you have multiple yards. If somebody moves something from your yard A and it goes to yard B, if somebody returns something at yard C, even though they rented it at yard D, you'll be able to see when it left and when it came back in. This is also really good for your maintenance and warranty tracking, so our system will alert you when something is due. If you put the warranty information in there, you can work on your preventative maintenance and extend the life of your assets. We also can do workforce time and attendance. If you want to have a tag on your people to know where somebody is in the yard or in one of the buildings and you want to know when they've come to work and left work, you can use this for time and attendance as well. Simply once they walk past the gate reader or through a doorway where there's an exciter, you'll know that they've come to work and you'll know when they leave work. Asset tracking, this can be done, and of course asset tracking can be indoors or outdoors. We have some heavy equipment dealers that do a lot of warranty work, so they have large parts departments, so you could also tag and inventory all of your indoor assets as well. We have perimeter motion sensing, so if you want to have it connected to CCTV cameras, if you want to put readers on your fence lines so you know if somebody is taking something through a fence, if somebody's cut a hole in a fence. If somebody is moving something where they're not supposed to. We also hear a lot of challenges around somebody returns a piece of equipment, somebody drops an accessory in the corner of the yard, you can't find that bucket. Using the active RFID system, you'd know exactly where that 30-inch bucket happened to have been dropped or left, or maybe it's still attached to a piece of equipment and you didn't know that, you'd be able to find it very quickly. And then you can also optimize from an asset utilization perspective, this system will tell you also dwell alerts, so it's going to tell you something if you want to set it up to say this piece of equipment or this accessory hasn't moved in this many hours or this many days or this many months, you could have it alert you to that and then you can make a decision on whether you need to sell that or rent this more, change the pricing on it or whatever it happens to be, you can also see which things are used most frequently and which are underutilized. So knowing this, and this leads into my next slide, knowing where things are and how often they're going out, you can really maximize that investment. Another area where I think there's efficiencies to be had in the equipment yards is on the rental turnaround, so when something comes back from a rental, how quickly is the team turning that around so you can rent that again? So for example, it comes back in, you could set up a metric to say when something comes back in, it needs to go to the wash bay, it needs to be inspected, and then it needs to be turned around and get ready to be rented again. And so what you can do is you will be able to see how long the average cycle is of taking this rental equipment and if something is sitting in the maintenance bay or in the wash bay for too long, you can have it set up alarms to tell you that something has been there located for too long. As I mentioned, you've got the warranty alerts, you can save on manual labor by not having to walk around and look and find something, as you saw in that Linda video, and in Bluebird, he's simply looking at the tablet, he knows where it is, he goes right to it, he gets it and he comes back, so there's huge efficiencies there. You can also identify and eliminate some bottlenecks, so if you know people are coming in to rent something, you can go and locate the accessories and that piece of equipment that they need and stage that together and have that ready to go out. This really does impact your customer service, there's nothing more frustrating if a contractor has come to pick something up and you can't find one of the accessories they need for that job. Not only will it impact them, but it may, we've talked to yards where they've lost a customer that day because they weren't able to find the piece of equipment that they needed and they've gone somewhere else and nobody wants to see a customer go somewhere else. The other place we see on the asset utilization is for the sales people who want to sell something. We've talked to many yards where their sales people will loan out a piece of equipment or they've moved something and the rental folks don't know that that's actually occurred or vice versa, a sales person thinks they're going to be able to sell something and now they can't locate it. Talk a little bit about the components of the system, so we've given you an overview on what the system does, some of the main features. For those who are in the IT side of things, this is how the network is architected. We won't go into huge detail here, but you'll see that you have your client workstation. This can be a desktop, it can be a laptop. You have the AllGuard server, that's where the system is hosted, it can be cloud hosted or it can be hosted on your premise, on your server. Then there's third-party applications, so we can export data out of our system into your ERP system or CRM or an inventory management system. That way you can get real-time information about where things are located and you can get the data, warranties, serial numbers, other information and either send those to us or we can send you data to your third-party system through our API. You have readers, both wireless and wired, so we have two options there. If you have power and Ethernet, you can connect that way. If you don't, you can use Wi-Fi and we can power these by solar, by AC or by DC power. And then the tags communicate back to the readers using 433 MHz. And the tags talk to the exciters at 125 KHz. So the exciter is what is located at the gates or the portal. That's what instantly wakes up the tag. So the tag talks to these two things and then the exciter talks to the reader. The exciter simply needs power. It does not need connectivity, so it needs either solar, AC or DC power. I'll talk a little bit about the tags. So the one on the right-hand side is the Hockey Puck tag. It's the ruggedized one, as I mentioned before. These are some of its characteristics, so I won't re-read those to you. And this smaller, low-profile tag is what we generally recommend to attach to personnel, to a badge. They can be put on a lanyard, onto a key fob. There's a set of keys there showing the tag in comparison to a watch. That tag is about the thickness of two or three quarters. It's 1.6 inches long by 1.2 inches wide, so it's a very small tag. And it's very low-profile, so it's quite discreet. This is what you can put on very small assets. So depending on what other rental equipment you have, you could have high-value equipment, but it's too small for the Hockey Puck tag, so you can put these small ones on it as well. They're waterproof as well. The outdoor infrastructure, you saw those in the video. They're in a NEMA enclosure, so they're ruggedized. They'll withstand harsh weather, dust, dirt, debris. They are waterproof. The cabling comes out of the bottom of them to keep them from leaking. They can be mounted on a pole, a tripod, a wall, a fence. So no matter what your outdoor space looks like, our technicians, project managers, will work with your low-voltage integrator or your people to make sure these are installed and configured properly. We have solar-powered readers, as you saw in the video from Linder. I'm not sure why that keeps skipping backwards. Okay, it doesn't want to stay on that slide. Apologies. But you saw those in the video. The solar-powered will do just that, eliminate the need to pull power to the perimeter of your yard. This is just some user interface views. So inside our software, we have a simple wizard that allows you to assign the tags to personnel and to assets. As I mentioned, you can batch upload a large quantity of inventory. You can do these one by one, or we can pull the information if you were doing thousands of tags with the serial numbers. You can also put pictures, descriptions, and other information in there. You can put the reminders in for the equipment, the warranty, and the maintenance. It's a really good idea to do this. You hate to miss a warranty date where you could have got something fixed or repaired at no cost. You want to locate tagged personnel or assets on demand. You simply pull up your floor plan or your outdoor map, and you'll see all the tags moving on the software. And when you hover on one of the tags, you'll see who or what that is assigned to. Or you can actually look somebody up or a piece of equipment by a serial number, a name, a description, a person by name, and then that will locate them on the screen. So you can do it two ways. And then you have a report wizard built into this, and it will generate reports on any kind of information. So if you want to see what a person did or an individual asset, where it had been moving for the last day, month, week, whatever it is, it can help you generate those reports. And once those reports are built in your system, you can email those out. You can download them in a CSV file or a PDF and then have those for your records. And we can set it up so it automatically generates them as well. This is an example of a third-party integration. There's a system called e-emphasis. It's an ERP system that helps you optimize your inventory, helps reduce logistics costs and inventory shrinkage, and saves a bunch of time and labor. And using this integrated into the GuardRFID system, you completely eliminate the need for a manual inventory count. So e-emphasis is a system that Linder uses. So we built an integration so that they could get better value out of both the GuardRFID system and their e-emphasis ERP system. We can do this for any number of software. I highly recommend customers taking advantage of this because it just gives you and maximizes your investment in both systems. We also can do – here's another example of a third-party system, CCTV cameras. So if you have cameras in your yard, what can happen is when a tag moves and it's not authorized or a tag moves into a zone that it's not supposed to be in, it'll activate the closed-circuit TV to turn on and start recording video. And then you're getting a live video stream from the alarm location, and you get that playback feature. So a perfect example, somebody's moving a piece of equipment at 2 in the morning. CCTV cameras come on. Somebody tries to steal that piece of equipment or successfully does steal that piece of equipment. Then you have video footage that you can give to the law enforcement and hopefully do one of two things, prevent the – by sounding alarms, it prevents the piece from being stolen altogether. Or if they are successful in taking it, then you have footage that you may not have had without the active RFID system. You can also set up system alerts, as I mentioned, and alarms. So you can have an alarm on a mobile device, a workstation, a visual alarm, an audible alarm. And you can have access control on doors and gates and entry and egress barriers. So when you walk up to a door and you have a tag and you're authorized to open that door, the RFID system will open the door and unlock it for you. Same thing, too, if somebody is not supposed to leave with a piece of equipment through a door. So, for example, if people can't take tools outside of the yard, you can have it so the door won't unlock or an alarm would sound when you approach that door with a tool that you weren't supposed to leave with or a laptop or any other thing that you're not supposed to take with you. This is an example of how Linder got some ROI with their system. They were able to prevent a $180,000 bulldozer from leaving the yard without authorization and the right paperwork. That unit rents for $2,800 a week. And so they potentially not only would have lost that revenue, but they may have even lost the bulldozer altogether. So this is just one example. I think there's a tremendous amount of revenue that can be lost on the rental side where people aren't properly doing the paperwork. Maybe it's not at the right rate. You can also set up alarms in the system to remind you when something is past due being returned. Let's say somebody has rented something for a week and then you've got it rented to the next person and it hasn't come back. And you can also ensure that your staff at the gate are checking paperwork to make sure that all the accessories and equipment that goes with the bulldozer, for example, have been accounted for or the backhoe or the bobcat or whatever it happens to be. I think I will pause there and see if anybody has any questions. And if not, this is our email address, sales at guardrfid.com, and our phone number, our toll-free number. If you're interested in a personalized demo and to discuss your business and how we can help, it would be our pleasure to do that. And I would like to thank you very much for your time today, and I hope you enjoyed the presentation. We look forward to hearing from you.
Video Summary
In this video, Kari Brock, the VP of Sales at GuardRFID, introduces their Automated Asset Utilization and Tracking system. The company specializes in active RFID technology for tracking assets and people. Brock discusses the background of GuardRFID, their solutions and technology, case studies, and the benefits of RFID technology. <br /><br />He explains that RFID stands for radio frequency identification and uses radio waves to transmit signals between a tag and a reader. There are two types of RFID technology: passive and active. Passive RFID tags require the tag to pass by a reader, while active RFID tags have a battery and beacon their location to readers. Active RFID tags also have longer range and can track movement and temperature. GuardRFID provides both types of technology.<br /><br />Brock demonstrates two case studies that highlight the benefits of GuardRFID's system. Linder Industrial Machinery tracks their equipment and accessories to improve inventory management and reduce time spent locating items. Bluebird Bus Corporation uses GuardRFID to quickly and accurately locate buses in their 40-acre facility.<br /><br />The video also covers the components of the GuardRFID system, including readers, tags, and software. It mentions third-party integrations with ERP systems and CCTV cameras, as well as the ability to set up alarms, access control, and alerts.<br /><br />Overall, the video emphasizes the benefits of GuardRFID's system, including increased productivity, revenue, and security, as well as improved reporting and data quality. The speaker concludes the video by offering a personalized demo and asking viewers to contact the sales department for more information.
Keywords
Kari Brock
VP of Sales
GuardRFID
Automated Asset Utilization
Tracking system
RFID technology
passive RFID tags
active RFID tags
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