JMU uses RFID solution to track the locations and maintenance records of thousands of classroom Audio Visual assets with the A2B RFID Asset Management platform.
This article was originally published by RFID Journal on May 10, 2024. To read the article click here.
Written by Claire Swedberg
Since deploying an RFID-based asset management system, James Madison University has been tracking its audio-visual equipment throughout its 400 classrooms in 50 buildings.
The solution—from A2B Tracking—provides the university with its cloud-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) management as the assets are audited in rooms throughout the busy campus. The system went live in 2020, and the university announced this spring that the system is providing a digital view into about 4,000 projectors, control systems, switchers, flat panel displays and other AV assets.
The AV equipment management system leverages Zebra handheld readers and passive, UHF RFID tags on assets. When used for regular audits, the technology reduces the time and labor required to account for the assets and if they are in the right place, university officials reported.
The solution enables use of the RFID data to locate assets that are misplaced, and to identify anything that may require maintenance or inspection.
Seeking a Faster Way to Track AV Equipment
JMU is a public university in Virginia that opened in 1908 and today serves more than 20,000 undergraduate students. The amount of AV equipment used by colleges, including JMU, has been rising over the years, and labor related to keeping track of that inventory has therefore grown exponentially as well.
Because much of the equipment is state funded, careful inventory and asset management is necessary–including an annual physical audit in which a team of workers locate and visually inspect every piece of equipment.
JMU’s Classroom Technology Services department is required to perform annual audits of its high value assets and trust fund items. To accomplish that, the department since 2008 has been using RFID to quickly locate equipment for the Fixed Assets Department. That department then uses a barcode scanner and visual inspection to scan and identify each asset in each room.
JMU uses RFID Solution
By 2020, the JMU’s technology services department was looking for a new RFID based solutions. The first system was not cloud based, and the university opted to then transition to the A2B Tracking system.
By the time the university began working with A2B Tracking, “we were already familiar with the advantages of RFID over barcode scanning,” said James R. West, JMU’s Classroom Technology Services director. “We chose A2B due to its ease of use and the cloud-based SaaS feature. A2B has robust inventory database features and the hosted inventory was important to us since we did not need to have a dedicated on-campus server set up.”
