TriggerBox Brings Efficiency To Singapore Hospital 

A local hospital successfully deployed IdeaLab’s TriggerBox Replenishment System in January this year. TriggerBox is a cloud-based e-Kanban system that automates the replenishment of medical supplies, resulting in greater efficiency and accuracy. 

Due to unpredictable amounts of medical items consumed, the hospital found it challenging to accurately forecast weekly replenishment quantities. With the TriggerBox system, the replenishment model is changed from a forecast-driven to a demand-driven supply chain, eliminating waste or shortages.

The system consists of dual-level stackable storage bins, each attached with an unique RFID replenishment card stipulating the product and quantity of each bin.

Hospital staff will take medical items from the first bin until it is empty. When the last item is taken, the staff detaches the RFID card from the bin and drops the card into the TriggerBox, which is a replenishment box with integrated RFID readers and antennas.

The box acknowledges the process with a beep and a green indicator light. The RFID card data is then transmitted to the cloud-based FOCUS™ RFID platform, which updates the replenishment transaction and triggers a pick order to the supplier's warehouse management system. 

Once the orders have been delivered, staff will collect the cards from inside the TriggerBox and wave them in front of the external antenna housed inside its door mechanism. This will close off the replenishment orders and update their status to “delivered”.

Hospital staff can use the FOCUS™ online web portal to track the live statuses of replenishment orders, as well as trace real-time and historical transactions.

TriggerBox went from conceptualization to prototype to live deployment in 5 months, and the entire process was carried out in-house by IdeaLab. The technology has been proven to be user-friendly, and provides visibility and convenience to the hospital. Because the technology is well-received, the hospital plans to expand system deployment to other sites in the upcoming months.

REAP Go-live!

After months of intensive development effort and training courses for warehouse personnel, REAP's final phase went live in Toll's Clementi warehouse last November! This makes it the world's first 3PL-managed end-to-end RFID operations for the FMCG vertical.

REAP is a highly scalable RFID warehouse execution system with comprehensive end-to-end warehousing process flows. 

The core benefits of REAP are:

• Improved operational productivity
• Enhanced accuracy
• True real-time visibility

REAP system utilizes RFID handheld readers, RFID-enabled lift trucks and RFID gantries. These devices interact with pallet and location tags to automate warehousing processes. REAP also communicates with a backend WMS system to update transactions and transmit instructions to users in real time. The system also utilises hybrid GPS-RFID technology to track in-transit deliveries.

RFID handheld terminal

RFID-enabled lift truck

RFID shipment gantry

An operations supervisor said: “Compared to the original process, there has been significant improvement in process efficiency, with fewer errors being made. Also, REAP provides real-time updates, which helps us to manage the warehouse better.”

REAP has received positive feedback from our warehouse operators. Though REAP is a new technology to them, they are excited about using it: “We are excited that we are able to work with new technologies and are eager to learn new things.”

Additionally, operators appreciate the automation that REAP brings, with one remarking: "The best thing about the system is convenience; it makes tasks easier and more efficient."

The success of REAP is a cumulation of years of R&D effort. True to the spirit of R&D, the system will undergo continuous improvement and constant innovation, with brand new technologies such as tablet computing and NFC already being integrated and introduced to operations.

Stay tuned for more innovations by IdeaLab!

TOLL Rolls Out Focus™ RFID IT Asset Management System

Idealab has rolled out its Focus™ RFID IT asset management system at Toll Global Logistics’ offices in Singapore. Toll has few hundred IT assets across the whole company, it has always been a problem to track and manage them.With RFID IT asset management system, all the IT assets will be registered in the system; IT department can visualize all the transactions and track the location of the assets. So how does RFID technology helps to manage notebooks, PCs and server components?

First, a small RFID tag is assigned to each IT asset.

A handheld RFID reader is then used to commission the tag. The tag is assigned to the asset by scanning the asset barcode.

RFID gantries installed in each office entrance automatically detect movement of assets in and out of the room.

The information is then sent to the Focus™ cloud server, where transactions can be viewed via a web portal in real-time.

By tracking the movement of IT assets, whenever the IT assets are missing or misplaced, users will be able to locate them by viewing last transactions records. 

An additional feature is the use of RFID staff passes. By linking an asset to an RFID staff pass, the system is able to detect when an asset is not handled by its rightful owner.

Thus when an IT asset tag and staff pass that pass through a gantry does not match; an alarm will be triggered.

Other functions currently supported include RFID stocktaking and asset write-off.

The system is a constantly evolving with new features being added, so watch this space for more updates!

Healthcare World Asia 2012

From left: Chua JooChye, James Chan, Kelvin Tan

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Location, Location, Location

We are exhibiting RTLS technology at the Healthcare World Asia conference today, so just thought to share a little bit about my experiences playing around with different variants of the technology.

We purchased an active RTLS system a couple of years back, this was based on proprietary 2.4GHz protocol using time-of-flight trilateration technology. The intent was to track the positions of forklifts as they moved about a warehouse. Installation was pretty painful, we mounted 4 readers/emitters 25 metres apart high up in the corners of a small warehouse. The claimed accuracy for the system was 0.3m. We expected the accuracy to drop due to the dense warehouse racking environment, but what we experienced surprised us - we could not even get anywhere close to even 5m of accuracy.  This means we couldn't even place the forklift truck in the correct aisle. We were in for another shocker: the 4 pieces of "AAA" batteries in a tag lasted only 3 weeks! We were later told by the vendor to reduce the tag's beaconing frequency to once every half hour - which would make the locating system about as useful as a flashlight on a sunny day.

We later explored Wi-Fi based RTLS solutions, but cost alone was absolutely prohibitive: we were quoted six figures for the "locating engine" software alone. We also quickly found out that if we wanted to do RTLS, we couldn't use "normal" routers and access points; we had to use industrial grade high sensitivity APs that cost a couple of thousand dollars - same as the price of a typical active reader. From chatting with industry experts, we found out that WiFi RTLS deployments are simply not working well in real life. Users complained about accuracy problems, with the system often pointing them to not only the wrong room, but the wrong floor!

After more research, we found an alternative to trilateration based technology - Infra-Red RTLS. We tested this and were happy to discover that it works really well, thus we are partnering with RF Code as the first company to bring this technology into the region. The theory is simple, RF waves passes through walls but infra-red waves don't. A lost-cost infra-red emitter floods a room with infra-red signals, with no spillover into adjacent rooms. Thus, a tag positively identifies it is inside a certain room, and reports its room ID to a single shared reader than can be more than 50m away. The advantages:

- better battery life than WiFi (up to 5 REAL years). WiFi is designed as a data transmission protocol with speed as its primary objective, and not power consumption

- lower hardware cost - much fewer readers needed, as well as lower network installation costs

- lower backend cost - trilateration is computationally resource intensive. Imagine a scaled-up deployment of 50,000 tags with a 10-second resolution - this means 5,000 trilateration algorithm computations every second, resulting in high-end server hardware requirements

- lower software cost - middleware costs a fraction of the 6-figure "locating engine" we were quoted

- more accurate positioning - sure, with IR you won't be seeing fancy visualisations of 1,000 tag moving about on a map in real time. But in practical terms, all a user is probably interested in is the answer to a simple question: Where is my asset now? And my bet is that  infra-red RTLS can answer this question better! 

Demo in a box: location accuracy up to 10 cm!

Back to School

We just completed a 3-day training series for the latest phase of Toll's REAP RFID warehousing system.

Nic, our REAP project manager barking out instructions...

Toll guys looking dapper in their new bright orange kit...

Contrary to popular belief, we think that barcodes and RFID can play nice...

Notice the handhelds - these are recently launched Motorola MC-9190Z's. We have been using pre-release prototype versions for over a year as Moto's beta testing partners, finally got our hands on the first production batches.

REAP will be shifting to a higher gear in a couple of weeks, things should get really interesting very soon. Watch this space for updates!

Our very first blog post!

Welcome to our very first blog entry! Seems like the commercialization of IdeaLab is very well underway. Stay tuned for upcoming RFID goodies!