Existing Challenges

♦ In 2010, the MDP group began looking for an Enterprise Asset Visibility solution to help it track the location of expensive consummables, the lack of which was causing the unproductive, labor-intensive search missions, which often led to the purchase of duplicate assets.

♦ Expensive assets were expensed instead of depreciated, thereby cutting into the annual engineering budget. A precious metal sputtering target costed upwards of $100,000, yet locating one required going from one storage location to another & without finding them, compelled the ordering of another item as an operational expenditure rather than searching for an existing one.

♦ Most existing RFID-based asset-tracking software provided basic asset location information, movement status, and elementary alerts and notifications. However, it was left upto them to customize the information to make critical business decisions, a time-consuming, costly and calculated effort for which they had no bandwidth.

Intervention of IT Asset Visibility

♦ InThing IT Asset Visibility Solution was chosen to provide accurate information on asset identity, status, ownership, location, and movement, using state-of-the-art sensor technologies such as RFID, Wi-Fi, Ultra Wideband (UWB), infrared, and ultrasound.

♦ InThing's Rapid Inventory System, Asset Reservation System alongwith two handheld RFID readers were used to tag, classify, and inventory over five weeks. Applied Materials was able to inventory 600 assets across its two buildings in just two hours.

♦ Custom antennas were designed and deployed to provide adequate coverage in the facility’s clean rooms and 8 RFID readers were mounted on doors—used together with InThing's Perimeter Control System to monitor the movement of assets in and out of specified areas. In the future, MDP plans to use InThing's Asset Visibility Solution together with its existing Wi-Fi network to track certain assets in real time.

Remarkable Turnaround on ROI

♦ Full asset visibility - MDP now has full visibility into capital and expense assets across its laboratory environment. The group can perform additional inventories or look up an asset in InThing's Asset Visibility platform at any time, with assets classified by specifications to improve identification and search capabilities.

♦ Increased Sharing and Lower Costs - MDP is already taking advantage of the solution to improve asset utilization and reduce the repurchase of existing components. 3 months after the solution went into production, the group had already prevented many unnecessary orders helping the company avoid $125,000 in unnecessary expenditures and forecasting $1M per year in total cost savings by tracking components.

♦ Fewer Labor-Intensive Search Missions - MDP employees no longer spend nearly as much time searching for assets. What took an average of 60 minutes to search storage rooms for a sputtering target, now takes about 5 minutes to find the same part, with 99-percent accuracy.

PHILADELPHIA DEPT OF ELECTIONS

Philadelphia Department of Elections Adopts RFID To Automate the Tracking of Voting Equipment and Ballot Returns During Election. Zebra’s RFID readers and InThing’s Voting Equipment Tracking Software (VETS) transform the logistics and security of elections.