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Sun Debuts Solution for Asset Tracking
Within the 6,000-square-foot Newark lab, Sun maintains more than 10,000 servers and other computing devices. Sarathy says Sun used to spend $2.1 million to hire a third party to inventory all of these assets once a year, but still could not account for millions of dollars' worth of equipment. These days, the bar codes once used to count the IT gear have been replaced with passive EPC Class 0+ tags, provided by Symbol.
An in-house team walks through the Sun facility weekly and conducts an inventory, using a handheld interrogator to read tags fastened to assets, as well as to specific fixed objects, such as server racks. If no fixed reader is installed within an asset tag's read range, Sun can determine the asset's location by comparing the time its tag was read with when the fixed object's tag was read. It takes less than an hour to do a complete inventory, he says.
The system has in been in use for six months, and Sarathy says Sun considers the system a significant improvement over the bar-code tracking it used previously. He adds that employees in the Newark facility have more success finding specific assets now. Sun now saves the $2.1 million a year it previously spent for the third-party inventory service at Newark. The company says it has spent roughly $200,000 to deploy the Newark system, but being able to get an accurate view of the assets within the facility should help Sun avoid duplicate or unneeded hardware purchases.
At the Sun Tradeshow Equipment Distribution Center, Sun manages several thousand assets that are shipped across the globe for Sun and partner events and tradeshows. The center has also deployed the asset-tracking system. Several times a week, shipments of various sizes leave the 5,000-square-foot Milpitas warehouse bound for local and international events.
As workers gather displays and electronic equipment for shipment, they read the Symbol EPC Class 0+ tags attached to the items. On-site personnel use handheld readers sent along with the shipment to conduct inventory of the assets during the event in order to ensure none are lost or stolen. The tags are again used to receive the items back into inventory at the distribution center.
The Sun RFID Industry Solution for Physical Asset Tracking is available now. Pricing information has not yet been released.
An in-house team walks through the Sun facility weekly and conducts an inventory, using a handheld interrogator to read tags fastened to assets, as well as to specific fixed objects, such as server racks. If no fixed reader is installed within an asset tag's read range, Sun can determine the asset's location by comparing the time its tag was read with when the fixed object's tag was read. It takes less than an hour to do a complete inventory, he says.
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| Sun enjoys many internal benefits from its new asset-tracking platform, the Sun Shared Lab Facility in Newark, Calif. |
The system has in been in use for six months, and Sarathy says Sun considers the system a significant improvement over the bar-code tracking it used previously. He adds that employees in the Newark facility have more success finding specific assets now. Sun now saves the $2.1 million a year it previously spent for the third-party inventory service at Newark. The company says it has spent roughly $200,000 to deploy the Newark system, but being able to get an accurate view of the assets within the facility should help Sun avoid duplicate or unneeded hardware purchases.
At the Sun Tradeshow Equipment Distribution Center, Sun manages several thousand assets that are shipped across the globe for Sun and partner events and tradeshows. The center has also deployed the asset-tracking system. Several times a week, shipments of various sizes leave the 5,000-square-foot Milpitas warehouse bound for local and international events.
As workers gather displays and electronic equipment for shipment, they read the Symbol EPC Class 0+ tags attached to the items. On-site personnel use handheld readers sent along with the shipment to conduct inventory of the assets during the event in order to ensure none are lost or stolen. The tags are again used to receive the items back into inventory at the distribution center.
The Sun RFID Industry Solution for Physical Asset Tracking is available now. Pricing information has not yet been released.
