The company — which rents out pro-level audio/visual, production, and computer equipment to all industry levels from hotels to film and television production — relied on warehouse processes that were largely effective but inefficient. This included functions like assembling rental kits with the correct items, processing returns and performing maintenance. Auditing the methods used for data collection revealed a manual, time-consuming process that involved a combination of scanning conventional barcodes and manually transferring data. The process, according to DeLuco, “took a lot of human interaction to get gear checked in and gear checked out.” And that made it susceptible to human error.
Each step was extremely labor intensive. For example, if employees wanted to add an item to a kit or process a return, they had to:
- Manually find it in the warehouse
- Visually confirm it was the piece ordered
- Scan the barcode or write down the serial number by hand
Finding the Right Partners
While researching the paths to improvement, DeLuco found an integrated solution from Rental Tracker, an experienced software provider specializing in the rental asset space, and Vizinex, part of HID Global — an RFID tag manufacturer with a line of tags well suited for tagging the type of assets deployed by rental companies in the entertainment space. RFID (radio frequency identification) technology uses radio waves to automate the tracking of assets. This lets users rapidly collect high-quality data about a given asset and track its location in the workflow. For rental companies, RFID provides an automated way to identify and locate rental assets within seconds, including equipment inside road cases and stacked on warehouse racks. After seeing positive results from an internal test of RFID, Rentex partnered with HID Global and the software provider Rental Tracker to implement a system that could automate and improve the efficiency of their rental processes.Understanding RFID Needs
Deploying RFID requires three components:- A tag that gets mounted on an asset
- A reader that pings the tag and relays information
- Specialized software that receives data from the reader and presents it in a way that enables workers and managers to make better decisions