As the demand for the gas cylinders increase, the gas suppliers are bound to add more assets to their business. These assets are tankers that each cost $150-$200. The investment being a huge one makes it necessary for a supplier to hold on to these assets. They simply lose track of what they have and where the cylinders are. It becomes even more complex if they have various offices and warehouses. Usually, the gas suppliers rely on manual mode for tracking their assets. Let’s see what happens in such a mode.
Here are the 5 ways manual asset tracking screws up your business:
1. It squanders a huge amount of time: Manually compiling an inventory of your gas cylinders takes up a lot of time of your workers. The process is reiterated many times while receiving, filling, shipping and tracking the gas. Plus, you might not even be aware that you have got the correct data entries from you employees or not. The data verification of your cylinders also seems to be a distant dream.
With RFID asset tracking system, the data is acquired machine-to-machine. The gas cylinders have RFID tags affixed to them. When the trigger on the RFID scanner is pulled, the tag is scanned and gives a unique identification code. With this, the assets are tracked in no-time. According to RFID Journal, “RFID is 15-20 times faster than manual and barcode processes for inventorying IT assets.” According to Motorola, “Some companies experience a 95% reduction in time using RFID.”
2. You do not have the updated information: Maintaining every minute’s data has become extremely important in the economically challenging times. Manually, it is unimaginable to keep a track of the updated information. The lack of customized reports hinders the growth of the business. The escalation in the business’ growth was guaranteed if the reports were reliable enough to make the best business decisions.
Employing IT asset tracking software, automatically updates the database as soon as a monitored machine comes online. It allows customizable data’s import and export. It can develop custom reports that can be your best friend in making the apt business decisions.
3. Unable to detect leakage before harm: The health of your cylinders is never guaranteed with a manual asset tracking system. The damaged cylinders keep on getting rotated, to supply gas, risking the lives of the customers, employees, and the truck drivers. The chance of leakage and fluid filled pressure gauges presents a danger to the customers’ relations and market reputation.
When the assets are tracked with the help of RFID technology, leakage detection becomes easy. Moreover, RFID tag has specifications such as delivery history, expiry date, product maintenance, etc. With this, the gas suppliers become fully aware of the cylinders that should go for testing or refurbishing and the ones that should be discarded.
4. It eats up a lot of money: Manual method of recording data is not only inefficient but costly. The labor intensive work eats up a lot of money of the company. The employees charge ample amount for the task of uploading data manually. The gas supply business has to invest money in the recruiting, training and maintaining of these employees. Even the mode of barcode for asset tracking proves to have certain shortcomings. For instance, the read rate of barcodes is limited to only one cylinder at a time. Due to this, the taken time and the rate of the labor increase.
RFID asset tracking service might be expensive initially, but it proves to give a faster return on investment. RFID can read 10s, 100s, 1000s cylinders simultaneously at once. The service does not need any training or maintenance cost and is extremely reliable. RFID can achieve 30% reduction in labor costs.
5. Losing the assets: Thousands of cylinders flow in and flow out of your company or research lab each year. When Industrial gas supply companies are unable to locate the cylinders, the price they are bound to pay becomes inconvenient. The time that is wasted in searching for these assets impacts the productivity and minimizes profitability. The inability to track the location of the cylinders causes companies to lose a lot of money and further spend more for buying new ones.
RFID GPS asset tracking makes it quite convenient to record tankers’ movements automatically and gives that data to the applications for asset management. The entries of information are accurate. With RFID, the companies will never lose cylinders again.
Acquiring an insight into the inventory may be impossible to do manually, but with inventory management system it has never been easier. Inventory software can gather this information for you and keep it up-to-date. Adopting RFID technology ameliorates the customer service experience as it has proven to achieve shipping, receiving and order accuracy of the cylinders by 100%. The companies can boost their profit as the efficiency of data increases and the extra expenditure decreases. Today, inventory and asset tracking has become a boon to the gas suppliers.