LaRC has long been a center of excellence for space training rendezvous, support for Mars landing projects and conducting earth science research to support a variety of principal NASA missions.
Recognizing that the proprietary and mission-critical nature of the research being conducted in its facilities required an enhanced level of asset tracking support, the NASA team turned to a highly reliable and flexible, RFID asset management solution to help them ensure the security of its data and protect its equipment.
Challenge
Government agencies and commercial companies alike face similar problems keeping track and managing critical assets in their organizations. These assets are some of the largest investments that any business or organization will make and as such, NASA’s Langley Research Center required a better method for managing inventory for thousands of critical data center assets as well as managing the movement of costly laboratory and testing equipment between the various NASA field locations.
“Ensuring that we could lower costs and achieve superior control of our datacenter assets, IT devices outside the data center as well as our in-transit testing laboratory equipment was absolutely achieved using this RFID solution.”
Steve Mercier, Senior Systems Engineer, NASA
Several existing challenges in tracking and identifying both the data center and highly mobile laboratory assets pointed to the need for a new approach. The LaRC team recognized that the physical inventories they were conducting were costly, time consuming and often highly inaccurate. In addition, the bar code labels being utilized were not readily visible or readable, contributing to the inaccuracies and it did not provide the ability to locate critical assets across multiple facilities on a more real-time basis.
Based on these challenges, NASA conducted a review process and evaluated several options to introduce a more efficient solution. As a government agency, they recognized that the solution that was selected absolutely had to be best-in-class, providing them the necessary functionality, while at the same time, maintaining budget limitations and meeting compliance requirements.
Solution
NASA needed to combine and implement the requirements of both assets needs in the data center and laboratory environments. The RFID solution implemented by DataSpan for NASA depends upon the successful combination of CS101 handheld readers and three different types of RAIN® RFID UHF tags from HID.
“We have seen a significant improvement in our Directorate’s ability to conduct fast and efficient inventories by approximately 80% using RFID and now have an accurate record of key testing and technical equipment being sent to and from field deployments.”
Steve Mercier, Senior Systems Engineer, NASA
Result
The fully integrated RFID solution has assisted in managing asset inventory and tracking, as well as creating some significant process efficiencies:
- NASA’s RFID Project Manager noted at the conclusion of the project that they have improved the speed with which they conduct asset inventories by 80%
- Mobile lab asset inventory is now inventoried at 100% accuracy
- With the cost and process efficiency savings, the Return on Investment for the complete project was just 18 months
- The solution can be scaled to multiple NASA sites, for multiple applications, based on these successes
