Harvard Medical School (HMS) reported that since the launch of the RFID solution to manage its 4,300 assets, the college’s asset inventory time has been reduced by 75%, while at the same time it has more visibility into the location of high-value assets and ensures They can be easily found during government audits.

This set of RFID solutions is provided by RadiantRFID, and consists of passive UHF RFID tags affixed to assets, 1128 handheld readers from Technology Solutions (UK) Ltd., and Radiant Web applications for storing and managing data . RFID-based asset management information will be uploaded to the Oracle Fixed Assets (OFA) system of Harvard Medical School.

Harvard Medical School has approximately 4,300 high-value assets in its 15,000 fixed assets, including servers, incubators, medical freezers, centrifuges, microscopes for DNA research, and thermal cyclers. Jeff DiCiaccio, the director of strategic procurement of the college, introduced the successful deployment.

Harvard Medical School

Nearly half of these assets were purchased with external funds, including government-funded grants and contracts, and the school is responsible for ensuring that these assets are foolproof. To ensure this, Harvard Medical School submits an audit report to Price Waterhouse once a year and conducts an internal asset inventory. Di Qiaggio said: "We must take good care of the assets we use and buy for research."

Before deploying RFID, Harvard Medical School used manual labor to perform asset inventory. Usually, each asset is entered into the Oracle Asset Workbench platform and assigned a printed bar code label. Accompanied by fixed asset financial analysts and Di Qiaggio, Research Operations Managers (ROM) carried a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and walked through each department or laboratory to find assets. Each department or laboratory has a unique serial number.

Since there is no barcode scanner available, they use their eyes to confirm the data, compare it with the information in the given room on the spreadsheet, and write notes or record the differences.

If they encounter any asset tags that are not listed on the spreadsheet, they must look it up in the OFA system on the computer to determine which department these assets belong to. Then manually enter the result of the asset inventory and upload it to OFA. This is not only a very time-consuming process, but it may also cause damage to those high-value assets. For example, the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School listed more than 800 assets in a 16-page spreadsheet.

Di Qiaggio will hold asset meetings with the departmental asset managers, accompany the asset research team through the laboratory and help them with asset inventory. This process takes an average of two hours to find 50 assets. Di Qiaggio said: "Such manual processes are inefficient and unsustainable because the school’s assets increase by about 1,000 items every year. In view of this, we have to take action to find alternatives."

Therefore, Harvard Medical School conducted a two-month bidding for automation solutions in the summer of 2017, then evaluated the bids and conducted a second bidding before awarding the contract. After choosing Radiant's solution, the college began field trials in two faculties that voluntarily participated in the test: Cell Biology and the Harvard Therapeutic Science Project. The medical school overcomes the challenges of cross-reading in the installation of readers to ensure that they are not captured by adjacent rooms.

This solution was subsequently launched in July 2018, after which it took Harvard Medical School 18 months to relabel existing assets and newly received assets with RFID tags. These pre-ordered tags will be associated with specific assets, and each tag and its related assets will also be linked to a specific room. Radiant's cloud-based Virtual Asset Tracker (VAT) solution comes with a mobile application called VAT2Go.

When employees start counting, they will use VAT2Go running on the iPhone, enter the building and the room they are entering, scan the barcode and read the RFID tag. After the tags are read, they can view the results in the app to confirm that all assets are in the correct locations, as well as missing and extra assets in the room. These results are synchronized with the online VAT2Go application, and users can download them and generate reports and upload them to OFA (OFA is still the fixed asset record system of Harvard Medical School).

Di Qiaggio said: "This web application allows us to make individual or large-scale changes by uploading or manually, such as reallocating assets to another location." Harvard Medical School can also use RFID solutions to scrap OFA Some assets in the VAT system and remove them from the VAT system. The benefits of RFID management include more accurate and efficient asset inventory, which means that ROM and asset managers do not have to interrupt their asset research when they carry out an inventory with them. The actual asset inventory process is also less destructive than manual.

The deployment of this technology has also encountered some twists and turns, and funding is an important challenge to slow down the project process. Some members left the project and switched to other jobs, and the COVID-19 epidemic caused the school to close in March 2020, allowing only necessary staff to enter. In fact, Di Qiaggio himself could not reach the scene, so he mailed the label to Sophia Xu, a fixed asset financial analyst at Harvard Medical School, who could continue to mark, count assets, and update OFA on campus.

Di Qiaggio said that since the system went live, the school has only conducted an asset inventory due to the epidemic. That is, the results of this inventory prove that the RFID system can save time. One of the advantages of RFID is that regardless of whether these assets belong to the Department of Cell Biology, the Department of Neurobiology, or even another Harvard school in the Cambridge area, RFID can read all the assets in the room without having to compare Asset information for each department or laboratory.

The audit conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers does not need to read RFID tags, but RFID provides the data support required for the audit so that the school can find any assets selected for audit and ensure that it is readily available when the auditor arrives. Today, it also includes virtual audits in Microsoft Teams meetings.

In the future, Di Qiaggio hopes that RFID technology can bring benefits to other changes, such as the renovation of laboratory spaces. The RFID reader can scan the items before the room is renovated, and then scan again when the items are moved into the newly renovated room to prevent the items from being lost.

Another benefit is the ability to use the reader to search for RFID tags in Geiger counter mode to locate lost assets. Di Qiaggio recalled accidentally reading the label of an invisible refrigerated centrifuge in 2019. "I was scanning at the time, but I couldn't see it with the naked eye. When I moved the reader closer to the signal source, I found this asset in a wooden drawer. If there is no RFID, I might think this asset has been lost. Stolen or discarded. With RFID, I can see intangible assets."

In addition to Harvard Medical School (HMS), RFID systems are currently implemented or put into use in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Wyss Institute (Wyss Institute). According to Diqiaggio, Wyss has completed the RFID tagging of all old assets, while FAS and SEAS are now tagging approximately 8,000 assets. The four colleges have a total of about 100 buildings, and each building contains assets.