RFID Intelligent Cabinet Solution

The RFID Intelligent Cabinet Solution from Identify RFID, presents the most proactive solution for automating on site inventory management.

Managing the distribution of medical supplies and devices is a demanding task. Intricate distribution models have been employed by various manufacturers, many that heavily rely on field inventory staff. For instance, a hospital’s customer service division may call their sales representative to inquire about and/or locate a particular piece of inventory that they require, counting on that person to identify and deliver the RIGHT product to the RIGHT hospital at the RIGHT time. However, unlike the retail sector where a stock-out often means a lost sale, a stock-out in the health industry could mean life or death and must be avoided at all costs, as patient safety is at stake. Thus, this once standard, now “old fashioned”, supply chain process contains too much risk for the medical community today.

Another challenge for the standard distribution style is product visibility. Traditionally, product status is manually recorded by field inventory staff which is inefficient and is subject to human error causing product to sit unused or dormant as ‘consigned inventory’ at numerous hospitals for months and even years.

Our Intelligent Cabinet Solution connects RFID reader technology with IoT technology. When a field device is connected to the internet, it becomes an extension of the distribution system. We can eliminate all manual inventory recordings and transform the inventory process into a paperless, trackable, usable system. The device can inform in  real time without increasing operation costs of on-site inspection.

How it works

We have leveraged and employed both Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and IoT technologies for this solution. Each product in inventory is affixed with an RFID tag. Our software correlates the RFID tags with key product information included but not limited to SKU, origin information, and expiration date.  RFID readers from Feig, both short-range (FEIG Max 50.10) and long-range (FEIG LRU1002) operate with the cabinet. The short-range reader is designed to increase security, while the long-range reader is employed for tracking purpose. Only authorized persons with authenticated RFID card credentials, can access the cabinet through the short-range reader security. The long-range reader will scan all devices in the cabinet at scheduled times, after reading the inventory tags, all tag information is sent to cloud server for data analysis.

This system allows your distribution system to automatically monitor your inventory on individual sites without assigning a person to manually count product on site as was necessary in the old model. The system also sends notifications of inventory that need to be replenished as well as any items that are dormant or have low movement. It will also highlight any items that are going to expire, further ensuring patient safety.

This information will not only promote exact inventory levels and heightened inventory security, it will help your business more efficiently plan stock levels on each site, future purchase commitments, and budgets.

The Benefits

• Reduces travel and personnel expense to each site.
• Improves patient safety by notifying expired or expiring product.
• Eliminates human error on stock counting.
• Increases visibility on stock levels at each site, resulting in a better understanding of client usage/utility.
• Helps prevent assets from getting lost or stolen as only the authorized personnel can access the cabinets.
• Identifies shortages or overstock for better inventory level management.
• Reveals your optimal asset utilization ratio saving investment dollars for expensive buffer inventory.
• Reduces physical contact with inventory items, avoiding exposure to contamination.

Today, the Intelligent Cabinet Solution has been successfully installed in 10 hospitals around Thailand, the most recent at the National Cancer Institute. 

Established in 2002, Identify RFID has continuously developed RFID solutions with a track record for several RFID innovations such as RFID warehouse management (TICTA Award 2009) and RFID fleet management (ICT Award 2009) as well as 3 patent on RFID solutions.