Microsoft UK Public Sector - Efficiency - RFID: Track and trace anything… and anyone

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been quietly developing in the world of supply chain and distribution businesses. When a product is picked, stacked, sent, stored and ultimately reaches your front door, there’s every chance that its progress has been monitored by RFID. It also has plenty to offer government organisations. Paul Bray finds out more.

Have you ever mislaid your mobile phone and had to ring it to find out where it is? If so you'll appreciate how handy it would be to be able to do the same with other items - not to mention people - so that you could locate them without having to hunt high and low.

And having found something (or someone), it would be equally useful if you could instantly identify what or who they were, plus any associated information that was important.

This is the idea behind RFID. Each RFID tag contains a small chip that stores a code which can be read remotely using a special radio scanner. It's a bit like a normal barcode, but with two important improvements.

First, you don't need line-of-sight to read it, so it doesn't matter if it's inside a box, locked in the store cupboard, or even the other side of a wall. Second, it can be read automatically without human intervention, so lots of tags can be read almost simultaneously and, if necessary, the system can generate an automatic response.

This is illustrated by the simplest and most familiar application of RFID: the security tags used to protect valuable goods in shops. These can be detected even inside a thief's shopping bag (no line-of-sight) and sound an alarm when they reach the door (automatic response).

"RFID gives an organisation greater visibility of its people and assets," explains Jeff Johnson, an RFID expert at Microsoft.

So how can it be used in the public sector? Some examples include:

• Product tracking: Libraries can put RFID tags on books to keep control of stock or to introduce self-service, and councils can put tags on waste bins to make sure they are returned to the right location.
• Document tracking: Organisations can track printouts of sensitive material.
• Compliance: Field workers can scan RFID tags on equipment to provide automatic confirmation that a job has been carried out.
• Asset security: Organisations can prevent loss or theft of items such as memory sticks and laptops.
• Inventory management: Staff can conduct a quick stock-take on a cupboard full of items, check-in a large delivery without having to look at every item, or check that items haven't passed their expiry dates.

RFID is already used for these kinds of application in other sectors - tagging visitors at theme parks, checking time-expiry on fresh foods, identifying equipment on oil rigs, etc. Ben Madgett, a senior analyst at DataMonitor, believes that new applications for RFID in the public sector are being found all the time – one example he gives is the use of RFID to track ballot boxes and prevent election fraud. “In the long term, RFID offers the potential to reduce labour costs and to improve efficiency,” he says.

Marrickville Council is a local authority in Sydney, Australia, serving a population of 76,000. The council has placed RFID tags in books and CDs, so that customers can check them out themselves. As a customer walks towards the self-checkout area, the tags are scanned and the server information is updated. If a borrower leaves without checking the items out, an alarm is sounded. The implementation of RFID has brought cost savings for the council, as well as improving the efficiency of the checkout process for customers.

RFID can add extra oomph when it is combined with a mobile device that transmits information wirelessly from the RFID tag back to a central server. Let’s take two examples:

• Maintenance workers have to check items of street furniture, such as lamp posts, to make sure they meet safety standards. If each item has an RFID tag, the maintenance worker can scan each tag after carrying out the check or repairing the fault. Confirmation that the task has been carried out, along with the details of the worker who carried out the task and the time it was carried out, can then be relayed wirelessly to the office server.
• Care workers for a local authority visit clients in their homes. Each client is given an RFID tag. When the care worker visits the client’s home, the tags can be scanned to show the time the care worker visited and how long the visit lasted. The mobile device then sends the information automatically to the office server.

In each case, the use of RFID cuts out unnecessary paperwork and provides accurate records of work carried out.

Microsoft's mission in developing Microsoft BizTalk RFID has been to demystify RFID and enable its mass adoption by integrating it with the BizTalk software layer. Instead of having to interface directly with different types of RFID hardware, application developers only have to interface with BizTalk.

Preliminary processing, such as de-duplication and data enrichment, can be done on the spot and the resulting data can then be plugged directly into clinical systems. RFID is also supported on mobile devices.

This out-of-the-box approach by Microsoft has been approvingly described by John Fontanella of analyst firm AMR as "RFID for Everyman".

The potential of RFID is increasing all the time, says Morris Novello, BizTalk product manager at Microsoft. "The next generation of RFID solutions will be deployed in ever more agile and flexible scenarios that will make the technology easier to deploy and use. RFID is definitely 'out of the warehouse' now."

BizTalk and RFID

BizTalk and RFID Mobile

Marrickville Council case study