You may already know how RFID* works, and how it benefits businesses through accurate, time-saving asset tracking. One surprising application is within the well-know bourbon distillery Wild Turkey, which adopted RFID to track its warehoused barrels of fine spirits. As reported in RFID Journal, the company formerly stamped each barrel with information about the barrel’s contents and the date the barrel entered the warehouse for aging. Keeping track of the whereabouts of each barrel was not just good business practice, it was mandated by government regulations. But maintaining a complete, accurate inventory required Wild Turkey’s warehouse crew to “eyeball” the information stamped on each of their 650,000 barrels – a time-consuming, labor-intensive and error-prone task.
Now, their RFID system starts tracking a new barrel at the time it’s manufactured, adding information to the barrel’s record when newly distilled bourbon is added to the barrel and when a warehouse location is assigned to start the aging process. Handheld RFID readers display the location and contents of every barrel in a warehouse, without the need for a warehouse staffer’s visual confirmation.
Regulatory compliance is now a simple matter of printing a report from the RFID software. Just as important, when a barrel has aged sufficiently and is ready for market, finding its location among its 650,000 neighbors is a snap. The fully-aged barrel is moved out of the warehouse, making room for a new barrel.
Even if you’re not operating a distillery, tracking the age of an asset is something that any business needs to do, particularly when the assets are documents. Like almost every enterprise, you probably have multiple file cabinets filled with documents. Many of those documents are long past their useful life, whether they were needed for operations or to fulfill regulatory requirements.
Add RFID tags to file folders, or even individual documents, and in the future any outdated documents can be identified easily, located quickly, and disposed of properly, whether disposal means scanning into a digital archive, or shredding securely. As you go forward, your files will contain only what’s required for current operations and record-keeping. And in the process, you’ll gain quite a bit of space formerly assigned to those old unnecessary documents – space that can be converted to more productive uses.
RFID pays you back in many ways: faster inventories, accurate asset records, and less storage space. An experienced RFID provider can show you how the benefits add up, and discuss a custom solution.
*(What is RFID? Find out here.)
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