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

Locating Laptops
The new RFID-based system will eventually replace the current spreadsheet-based application. The live tracking of laptop movement within company premises will now be possible, Kumar notes, and report generation will be a simple, one-step process. Cognizant managers in the NSS will have easy access to data on the history of laptop assignments and returns.

Another benefit will be a decreased likelihood of the computers being stolen from Cognizant facilities. "To some extent, the RFID solution acts as a theft prevention system," Kumar says. "If an unauthorized person carries a laptop, it will result in an alert."

The company expects to see a quick return on investment for its tracking system, based primarily on labor time savings. The existing process of employees generating and submitting paper gate passes for laptops takes, on average, about two minutes per day per employee. Given the number of employees with laptops, Kumar says, the overall time savings will be substantial—and employees can spend that time on more productive activities.

According to Kumar, Cognizant spent about $25,000 to deploy the system at the two Indian facilities. The cost of implementing the system in each additional building will depend on the number of entry/exit points and the number of tags needed for that location. For a typical building with two entry/exit doors and 100 laptop users, he says, the tracking system is projected to pay back the investment within eight to 10 months.

Cognizant learned some lessons during the implementation project, which it can use to help its own customers with similar technology rollouts. For one thing, Kumar says, "RFID tags that are popular with most RFID applications are unsuitable for use with laptops," because of the metallic components that cause tags to stop functioning or read ranges to be drastically reduced.

"An air gap is needed between the body of the laptop and the tag," Kumar says. "As this gap increases, the read range also increases." Cognizant found the specially packaged tags it is using to be the best passive tag technology because they provide the air gap, as well as an extended antenna, which significantly increases readability.