Schools and colleges
Assettrac has many educational sector clients.
Most education establishments hold a large and diverse range of assets, from computers to furniture, site machinery to vehicles, and scientific instruments to sports equipment. Ownership or management of high value inventories brings a stack of paper to the desks of bursars, facilities and IT managers unless modern tools are employed to record many aspects of the equipment lifecycle.
In order to track who’s got what where, ie a physical audit, we supply a three part solution comprising tag, often a customised tamper resistant label for marking both assets and locations, barcode terminal, and management software. This approach is very much faster than the traditional clipboard approach and develops a large range of benefit. Auditing is made much faster and far more accurate.
Assettrac can even provide an on-site team of specialist auditors to do the initial asset tagging and data recording
Tracking Revenue Generating Assets and Equipment Movements
A gas supply company transports emergency oxygen cylinders to ambulance stations and other emergency service providers. The cylinders are implanted with a small microchip instead of a surface label which would quickly deteriorate with regular handling and abrasion. These gas bottles are counted out to each client and the ‘empties’ collected with a hand held RF scanner and the details instantly transmitted by GPRS to the client server. An invoice is automatically produced, the value of which depends on the number of days each cylinder spends with each client. The system provides the client with an instant picture of the cylinder distribution across the country.
A pest control company used to use a tick sheet to monitor its equipment transferred daily on and off vans being taken to client premises. This caused many errors with little computer backup and consequent impact upon their inventory control and theft losses. Converting the whole process with security labels on equipment, vans, and storage facilities has resulted in a streamlined barcoded management system removing all the historic problems with a paper based process.
A hotel chain moved its main computer servers from Leeds to a new London office and used our barcode terminals and software to ensure all this important equipment arrived.
An early learning centre scans toys out to playgroups and in again, using barcode labels instead of tick sheets.
Inspections
All organizations have a duty of care over fixed assets that have the potential to cause harm, and compliance with health and safety legislation means carrying out and recording inspections regularly and indefinitely.
We have supplied many local authorities with scheduling and recording software so that data may be transmitted to and from handheld computers synchronized with the host PC. These PDA devices replace the clipboard and deliver user defined data fields by cable link without the need for keying in manuscript from paper survey reports. The procedures are used for risk assessments on memorial headstones, trees, and vibrating machinery.
A commercial client has a similar system for recording the maintenance of CCTV cameras monitoring valuable museum collections.
A specially written inspection program was delivered to a major contractor to London Underground. Together with microchips supplied and implanted every few yards in concrete ‘catch pits’ under the rails and rugged handheld readers, inspectors interrogate the chip which ‘picks’ and displays the last survey results. The new inspection is carried out and repeated down the line until completion of the shift when a download back to the host PC is made. The program stores all inspection results so that a full audit trail can be reported in the event of query. Thus duty of care can be established in the face of accident inquiries.
Scientific and research applications
The Millennium Seed Bank, Part of The Royal Botannical Gardens at Kew collects seeds of endangered plants from all over the world. These very important samples to the scientific community and are kept in barcoded glass jars in cold storage vaults and regularly moved to work stations for laboratory analysis. All the movements are monitored by our program which shows who is or has been working on each specimen and where it currently is located.
Using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in burial grounds
We have more than 50 burial ground operators from both the public and private sectors using our system to track and record 'green burials'
Most public and private managers of natural or ‘green’ burial grounds do not permit the erection of traditional memorials or headstones. Long term identification of particular graves in surroundings which change over time is addressed by over forty clients through the use of microchips encapsulated in plastic pegs placed underground to mark the burial plots. The chip number is unique to each grave, and linked to the burial register in order to ensure that further interments or an exhumation are at the correct grave and do not compromise the landowners reputation.
Microchips may be encapsulated in many different ways so that