EasyMonitor™

The RFID Challenge

While CIO’s have been centralizing IT infrastructure to remove the cost of device maintenance at the edge, along comes RFID populating remote distribution centers and office locations. While deploying the technology includes its share of challenges, maintaining and supporting it without local technical resources at each location becomes an unwieldy proposition. Every time a reader goes down, the help desk is forced to send a technician to reset the readers, change configurations or swap them out. If all of the readers are in a data center that may be okay given the centralization of technical talent. If not, then the cost of van roles and onsite tech visits is exceeded only by the frustration by end users of extended system down time. As RFID is employed as a real-time operational capability, up-time and quick issue resolution becomes a paramount requirement that traditional NMS cannot address.

The RFID EasyMonitor™ Solution

EasyMonitor™ automates the monitoring, management and maintenance of RFID infrastructure in a user-friendly and scalable manner from an offsite location. With EasyMonitor™, problem root causes are quickly identified and addressed remotely, dramatically reducing on-site troubleshooting needs. It presents all of these capabilities in an easy to navigate, to-scale, visual topology of the RFID infrastructure deployment. Users can see and reconfigure RFID performance in real-time from a command dashboard that is topologically accurate. EasyMonitor™ enables RFID use cases to operate that demand accurate and sustained RFID performance. The solution can typically be installed and configured in about one day so going from no support to fully automated is a rapid process.

The RFID Solution Components

EasyMonitor™ is a hosted RFID monitoring and support solutions and includes numerous features such as:

• Granular Alerting – Problems with the reader, individual antennas and applications on the reader are detected and reported to the user.
• Custom Event Alerting – Create rules to define custom events. This enables detection of problems with motion sensors and business processes.
• Diagnostics – After a problem is detected, the tool steps help desk or other authorized personnel and field technicians through manual and automated steps to resolve the problem. The diagnosis includes complete tracking of who took the action and when they did it providing a full audit trail.
• Firmware Upgrades – Update all readers firmware in the network at once, or schedule updates. EasyMonitor™ will upgrade readers with up to date firmware or roll back to a known good version of firmware at a scheduled time.
• Configuration Management –The current and past configurations are stored in the tool. Management of the best configurations are viewable centrally. Automated Reporting – Configurations are automatically stored and full or partial reports of the RFID system can be generated on demand.
• Visual Management – The GUI provides CAD based (to-scale topology) and hierarchical views of the RFID network. When sites call up with a problem, issues can be quickly resolved because the help desk will be able to view readers in the context of the facility.

The RFID Results

EasyMonitor™ typically can save tens of thousands of dollars annually in avoided on-site maintenance costs and provide robust and resilient performance required by many RFID production environments.