Eating Your Own Dog Food: Cognizant Uses RFID to Track Laptops

The second possible result is an unmatched pair of laptop and employee tags, which occurs if an employee carries a laptop that is not paired with his or her employee badge. In such a scenario, the service returns a red signal with an alert (a beep sound) at the interrogator location. This could potentially be an unauthorized removal of a laptop.

A third result occurs when only a laptop tag is detected—that is, when the reader cannot associate a laptop tag with any employee badge, triggering an alert. And a fourth result happens when only an employee tag is detected—in other words, when an employee passes through the RFID zone without the signed-out laptop, resulting in a blinking yellow light indicating the occurrence of a tag read event.

The new RFID-based system will eventually replace the current spreadsheet-based application.

During the third phase of the implementation, the project team conducted integration testing with the antenna/reader combination at the RFID Center of Excellence lab in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Cognizant then tested the system at the company's Network Support Services (NSS) facilities at its Kolkata development center.

In phase four, currently underway, the system is being deployed throughout Cognizant's development facilities worldwide. Each company-owned laptop is being equipped with a Symbol 4T/Confidex RFID tag. Whenever the firm purchases new laptops, Kumar says, the manufacturer's name, model and asset numbers will be mapped in a database against the tag's EPC identification. When a laptop is assigned to an employee, that person's employee identification number will also be mapped against the laptop tag EPC ID in the database.

Laptop assignment details will be stored in a database maintained by NSS. When an employee returns a computer to the NSS, the asset-tracking application will disassociate that person's employee ID from the laptop tag's EPC ID in the database.