PERG has reported in the past about the challenges of implementing RFID in camera and lighting rental. For a company with potentially hundreds of thousands of items to track, the initial cost may well be prohibitive. However, I recently toured the facility of a young company that has been successful in gaining significant time savings using RFID.
Dynamic Rentals is a Los Angeles-based camera and lens rental company with a unique business model. They do not rent their gear to production companies; they only sub-rent to other rental houses. Brandon Zachary, formerly of Abel Cine, founded the company in 2017 with the mission of providing back-up for rental companies, to help them complete their orders without having to call all over town, and they do so without also being their competitor. As a brand-new company, Zachary had the unique opportunity to start from scratch with everything, including establishing a state of the art inventory control system using a blend of RFID and standard barcode readers.
Dynamic Rentals chose RentalWorks (by Database Works) for the inventory tracking and asset management software. An iPod touch, loaded with the QuickScan mobile app, sits on top of an RFID scanner (which can also function as a standard barcode reader) providing wireless integration with RentalWorks.
The larger items in the inventory—cases and camera bodies—are fitted with 1.5 x 0.5-in. RFID adhesive tags. Smaller items like lenses, cables, and accessories take 1 x ¼-in. tags. The tags are also printed with the barcode and company name. At check-out and check-in the technician opens the case, waves the bar-code scanner over the items, and all items with RFID tags are automatically identified and counted in a couple seconds. The operator may still need to read the barcode on some items that are hard to tag, like rods and brackets. Nevertheless, Zachary reports a significant time savings. For example, an ARRI WCU-4 unit (wireless three-axis lens control unit) has about 50 separate parts. It might normally take 15 minutes to process. The RFID system gets that down to a couple minutes, enabling Dynamic to respond very quickly if items are missing on return. The app shows the technician which items should be in the case and which ones have not yet been scanned. Although the tech still needs to make a visual inspection for damage, Zachary says using RFID makes more productive use of his employees’ time. As an additional benefit, Dynamic’s Business Development Manager, Austin Rios, says the scanner can be used to find a needle in a haystack. For example, if a particular grad filter could be in any one of several cases, you just tell the scanner the ID code for the item you want to find and wave the scanner over each case. If the item is in the case, the scanner beeps.
Dynamic Rentals keeps RFID tags at the ready for new inventory. RFID tags have to be ordered well in advance because they have to be encoded, requiring about a six-week lead time.
As systems evolve, and PERG members embrace new technologies and systems, PERG will keep reporting out the progress. If you have a story that might be of interest to other rental companies, we’d love to hear about it. Contact the PERG manager.
Although great that Dynamic Rentals are using RFID, it looks like the technology still suffers from the same problems that have plagued RFID users for years, namely that roadcases have to be opened and a wand waved around to get readings, and metal items such as rods & brackets can't be read and have to fall back to a barcode.
ReplyDeleteNavigator Systems, a UK PLASA member solved these issues over 10 years ago. Our HireTAG arch allowed a roadcase full of random equipment such as cables, brackets, cameras etc to be rolled through an airport security style scanning arch and every item would be successfully "scanned" out & tracked. We demonstrated this at PLASA'08 and everyone that saw it was amazed at its speed & accuracy. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kgbumUsCvc for a video of it in action.
The system was put through its paces by several internationally known rental companies and passed every test they threw at it with flying colours, however, the world financial collapse was just around the corner and unfortunately these businesses couldn't be seen to be investing in technology whilst at the same time they were making staff redundant.
So, the HireTAG project got mothballed and the team started working on other Navigator Systems’ projects.
All that said, we do still have the IP and the team members are still working at Navigator Systems, so if someone wanted us to "get the band back together" it could be done, albeit with a significant financial investment.