A successful equipment rental company experienced growth pains due to a rapidly expanding customer base and asset inventory. At times, assets got lost in the warehouse because they were not always booked in properly. The company had responded with processes and paper trails, but re-attaining a satisfying level of profitability per asset, continued to elude them.

Solution: Dual frequency RFID labels to drive automation

Brady Corporation offered to replace the company’s asset barcode labels with reliable dual frequency RFID labels, placed RFID and NFC print & program systems on-site, and delivered scanners, equipment inspection software, and integration with existing company ERP-systems.

When a customer orders an item, that item is now located in the warehouse in real time by fixed UHF RFID scanners. Pickers can home in, on foot or driving a forklift, on the ordered equipment using their portable scanner. Items pass via fixed RFID scanners before being loaded on a lorry, and lorry cargo can be checked quickly with a portable RFID scanner in just a few minutes. As a result, errors in equipment delivery are reduced significantly without substantial time investments.

Dual Frequency RFID labels can not only be scanned with professionals scanners, but also with modern smartphones. This enables customers to easily, and very accurately, signal pick-ups for specific rented items they no longer require. All customers need to do to enjoy our customer’s high-tech service, is install an app to their smartphone, a process that can be initiated by scanning a QR code at your facilities for example. Data generated can be linked to your billing process, and can be shared with equipment pick-up services to make sure the right item is returned.

When equipment returns to the warehouse, employees can book it in with a portable RFID scanner in seconds. Alternatively, strategically placed, fixed RFID scanners can also identify the returned equipment and share data to support the next steps in your processes.

In addition, because every item can be located in real-time via the RFID solution, warehouse inventory audits are no longer a challenging activity. Auditing the inventory has become a matter of clicks, or minutes.

To sustain the solution, Brady also supplied RFID label printers. These enable our customer to quickly create additional RFID labels so they can continue to expand their offer with full flexibility.

Results: Automated equipment management

The rental company no longer needs to reclaim equipment lost in their warehouse manually. The entire active inventory is automatically available for rent thanks to an automated book-in and book-out process based on RFID technology, enabling the company to grow efficiently.