Sun Microsystems Employs Own Asset Tracking Solution

Taking inventory at Sun sites now takes hours instead of weeks

Sun Microsystems Inc. (www.sun.com/rfid) released its Industry Solution for Physical Asset Tracking. This arrangement of products and services simplifies and accelerates the process of designing and integrating an RFID solution for tracking physical assets by allowing users to more effectively manage their physical assets, keep an effective inventory of exactly what assets they have, and how those assets are used.

The new solution improves asset utilization and visibility by determining real-time location of assets and notifying the users when an asset is not where it should be. This helps companies to reduce operating costs, decrease shrinkage, and lower maintenance costs.

The system has already been deployed at two Sun locations. At the Sun Newark Shared Lab Project, Sun maintains over 10,000 servers and computing devices. In an hour's time, Sun can verify the location and physical characteristics of all assets at the facility without a network connection. It also has the ability to perform full weekly inventories in under an hour.

Julie Sarbacker, Director of RFID Solutions at Sun, explains how things worked prior to using this system: "To perform a physical inventory once a year at a shared lab facility, it would cost several millions of dollars and would take several weeks with trained personnel using barcode scanners. By the time they were done, some of the information was already outdated."

The Sun Tradeshow Equipment Distribution Center manages thousands of assets deployed around the world for events and tradeshows in which Sun and its partners are involved. "One reason we deployed this solution ourselves was because of a tradeshow we did in Shanghai," says Jim Clarke, Chief RFID Architect of Sun. When it came time for the show to send back their equipment, Sun handed it over to the show because they thought it would have to go through customs.

"After two months, we didn't see our RFID equipment," Clarke continues. "We thought it got held up in customs, but it turned out that the tradeshow people had put it in a corner of a warehouse because no one knew what to do with it, so it just sat there. That spurred our conversation for using RFID to track that sort of thing."