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In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations need to monitor their inventory and assets in real time to enhance operational efficiency, boost productivity, mitigate losses, and maintain comprehensive visibility over industrial processes.
While inventory tracking revolves around the goods a company manufactures or sells for short durations, asset tracking pertains to the items an enterprise consistently utilizes. Examples of asset tracking vary across sectors and can encompass anything from laptops and warehouse lifts to medical equipment in hospitals or even personnel in certain contexts.
The evolution of IoT technologies, communication advancements, and device miniaturization have broadened the asset tracking landscape across multiple industries. As businesses deploy increasing numbers of assets across diverse locations, the significance of IoT and cloud computing intensifies—from device management to advanced analytics and extracting actionable insights.
Organizations strive for a seamless experience in:
- Asset onboarding across various technologies (e.g., RFID, BLE, Wi-Fi, and LoRa).
- Lifecycle management, audits, and reconciliation.
- Data ingestion from various sources, including RFID readers, BLE and LoRa gateways, Wi-Fi devices, and GPS.
- Data analytics, reporting, and unified governance.
This article explores how HCLTech’s Intelligent Asset Tracking & Management (IATM) solution empowers enterprises to enhance operational efficiency and productivity by offering asset tracking capabilities across different technologies.
The IATM solution, developed by HCL IoT Innovations, aims to digitally transform asset inventory management processes and enhance asset visibility through proactive notifications and alerts for asset managers. Its plug-and-play design integrates seamlessly with existing enterprise systems, leveraging IoT capabilities throughout the asset lifecycle.
As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP), HCLTech’s IoT Innovations unit assists organizations at various levels of IoT adoption with its define, build, and run framework.
The Evolution of IATM
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a comprehensive suite of services that supports every layer from edge to cloud. AWS IoT offers a managed cloud service capable of ingesting trillions of messages from billions of devices and integrating with other AWS services to help businesses create complete solutions such as IATM for diverse applications, from industrial to connected homes.
Initially, IATM evolved from an RFID-based solution designed to track assets and manage inventory for end-user computing (EUC) devices at the enterprise level. Businesses required streamlined processes for managing devices and improving inventory visibility, leading to enhanced accuracy in their asset management databases. The consequences of poor asset visibility can have significant financial implications.
IATM has continued to evolve with the objective of delivering scalable solutions based on IoT and IIoT that meet global customer needs while supporting various technologies such as Wi-Fi, BLE, and GPS, offering customers flexibility in connectivity and tracking requirements.
IATM Applications Across Industries
Organizations of all sizes recognize the critical need for asset tracking to maximize asset utilization and minimize losses. For instance, healthcare providers manage an extensive range of equipment for patient care, while energy and utility companies must oversee fleets of field vehicles equipped with grid-maintenance tools.
The IATM application architecture features a modular design, allowing customers to implement an asset tracking solution tailored to their industry and asset types.
IATM: IT Asset Tracking
The IT asset tracking solution utilizes RFID technology for both EUC and non-EUC devices like laptops, printers, and monitors. During the onboarding process, RFID tags are affixed to each asset, and fixed readers track their movements, transmitting location data to the AWS Cloud via AWS IoT Core. The IATM portal reflects real-time information for each device.
Additionally, handheld terminals (HHT) facilitate asset onboarding, searching, auditing, and deboarding, with updates sent to the IATM portal through secure HTTP channels.
Beyond RFID, IT assets can also utilize soft tagging, a virtual tag running as a lightweight program on each device to provide information related to the IATM platform.
IATM for IT assets streamlines the entire lifecycle from onboarding to deboarding, encompassing:
- Asset tagging, onboarding, and inventory updates.
- User allocation, returns management, maintaining states, and stock information.
- Audit and reconciliation processes.
- Real-time asset movement tracking.
With a comprehensive process in place, IATM enhances the functionalities of gateways and sensors.
IATM: Smart Warehouse Solutions
In line with its product development roadmap, HCLTech has introduced a new variant of IATM for warehouses called IATM: Smart Warehouse. This solution addresses key challenges in inventory visibility, optimizes current warehouse processes (both inbound and outbound), and reduces safety incidents by tracking Material Handling Equipment (MHE) inside the warehouse.
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