RFID in Higher Education for Fixed Capital Asset Inventories

Managing fixed capital assets across higher education campuses can be hard to coordinate and manage. This is especially true when you have an array of assets that need to be tracked like IT equipment, medical devices, research equipment, and other infrastructure that are critical to operations. Universities, colleges, research universities, and medical universities that use traditional methods for inventory management are prone to errors and take a significant time commitment to complete. Barcodes and manual processes like Excel spreadsheets will slow you down. With RFID technology, Higher Education institutions can revolutionize their fixed capital asset inventories, increasing accuracy, and overall productivity.

Case Study: RFID Implementation in a University

On our website, you can find a case study with Western Illinois University. You can see their RFID success by clicking here:

WIU is responsible for inventorying approximately 30,000 fixed and mobile assets across 2 campuses located 80 miles apart. Assets including laptops, projectors, vehicles, furniture, artwork and a variety of other equipment must be inventoried.

Benefits seen:

• Decreased Time: Our customer found more than a 50% time savings over their previous process.
• Reads dozens of tags simultaneously: In a room that used to take 15 minutes with their manual process it is now taking 51 seconds.

WIU deployed a passive RFID system using inLogic’s RFTrack software platform, which is integrated with their fixed asset Financial system. Passive RFID tags from Metalcraft were deployed on campus assets, along with Zebra handled RFID readers. The solution is working better than anticipated. WUI projects more than a 50% time savings over their previous barcode process. One particular classroom that used to take about 15 minutes to inventory using barcodes, now takes 51 seconds with RFID.