Tracking and managing owned assets is essential to ensure their security and quality as well as to better manage their life-cycles. Various accounting requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx) and Government Accounting Standards Board Statement 34 (GASB 34), also call for accurate accountability of assets. Proper asset management also helps to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. Asset management is particularly critical when the asset (e.g., a container) is the proxy for the goods inside the container (e.g., bulk chemicals, gases, bulk milk, etc.).
As such, companies, organizations and agencies must be able to reliably validate, track and maintain assets in order to effectively manage them. While most companies maintain asset information databases and asset management systems, they still use barcodes or other manual identification systems to collect data about their assets. These manual processes are not only costly and labor intensive; they provide no visibility into the movement, usage, or in the case of container assets, specific information of the contents within.
In an Electronic Product Code (EPC)-enabled Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) solution for asset management, valuable asset are uniquely identified and tracked error-free, delivering a fast, automated, ‘hands-off’ auditing. This enhanced asset management solution not only saves labor costs normally associated with tracking assets, it also provides the ability to optimize asset-related capital by scheduling asset replacements and repair (without taking the assets out of service) and additional investments.
In this type of solution, assets can be scanned by a handheld device or as they pass under a reader (i.e. shipping containers) and the information is associated with a particular area or location and feed into a back-end asset-management database, via the wireless LAN connection.
For more information about how an EPC-enabled RFID solution can improve tracking and management of your assets, please call +1 937.291.3300 or email EPCinfo@gs1us.org
View the best practice guide for Enhanced Asset Management.