RFID tags need not to be physically present only on the exterior of an asset but, they can be mounted safely in a place where they may not be visible easily to the eye but are none the less, easily visible to an RFID reader.Therefore a company can easily tag all its assets with RFID tags.
The tags need not always be pasted on, they can be located in a place from which they may not easily get damaged or Since a physical line of sight is not required, even in case of dirtying, they are still visible to the reader.For tagging assets in a manufacturing plant, industrial grade tags are available.Typically they can be attached to metal surfaces without problems or If required, they also came with safety certifications allowing them to be used in hazardous areas.The system works like this. An asset is tagged at the time when it is dues for its next physical verification. The tag need not be the same for each asset. One can have different types of tags depending on the physical nature of the asset, its mobility, its replacement value and other such factors. For example a steel reactor which is fixed at one location would have a different type of tag than a laptop, which is a mobile asset. Also the vulnerability of the laptop to theft or malicious “vanishing” may be more than that of the steel reactor, even though its replacement cost is low.After analyzing these different classes of assets, one can come up with a tag type list for each asset. After this is done, the tags are physically fixed in locations on the assets which are not necessarily visible to the naked eye, but are nevertheless visible to an RFID reader.The tag numbers are unique and each tag number corresponds to a unique asset in the company’s asset register or asset database, which may be a database in its ERP system. The unique ID number of the RFID tag thus points to the corresponding asset in the database.An external independent auditor can now easily roam about the plants and offices, armed with an RFID reader to query each asset. This system gives a remarkable amount of transparency to, what has been till date, a pretty much opaque system. This increases the confidence of auditors in the company’s management manifold and leads to lesser legal hassles of compliance.