Indonesian Telecom Operator Uses RFID to Manage Office Assets

This multinational telecommunications group engaged in Internet, fixed line and mobile phone communications is headquartered in South Jakarta. It is Indonesia's largest mobile operator with more than 164 million users. The company owns up to 200 office buildings across Indonesia, each containing hundreds or thousands of assets.

Tio said employees in each office must regularly inventory and inspect each asset and then share the data with the company's headquarters. Traditionally, since each office building has its own inventory counting methods and regulations, the data generated are not uniform. Some office buildings or branches use barcodes to scan and count assets, while others manually enter data into spreadsheets. In 2020, Telkomsel's management negotiated with Tio and asked him to adjust and standardize all inventory systems. Management wanted to implement a unified system at headquarters to display all assets. Tio said: “My responsibilities include all assets in all 200 offices, from the Jakarta headquarters to small branches providing close service. Before deployment, if anyone asked how many assets the company had in total, no one knew. So I Start thinking – how can I monitor my assets?”

He wanted to find an integrated, affordable system that could run on all sites and provide automated data.

It was clear early on that Telkomsel needed a versatile UHF RFID solution to automatically capture data on assets used in office operations such as furniture, electronics, chairs, tables, lamps, coffee machines, laptops, small equipment and other assets.

Therefore, Tio worked with five technology providers and tested their solutions in multiple office buildings. The tests included the system's ease of use, the ability of the software to integrate with management systems, and economics. Additionally, they tested the time required to inventory all assets. "We have to monitor hours because we have so many scattered office buildings," he said.

In the end, Telkomsel chose Cudocomm's Asset Watcher asset management system. Tio recalls, “The pain point of the project was integrating the system across all our sites.”

Therefore, the goal of the software is to create standardized categories for rooms and floors within each building to which assets are assigned. This enables the company to set up a grid of rooms and floors within each building and assign locations to each asset. The user can then read the tag ID in each room.

Yugo Budiyanto, CTO of Cudocomm, said that through the solution’s “Asset Transfer + Mobility” feature, users can identify misplaced items and place them back in their correct locations.

Each asset is first labeled with Confidex's Ferrowave Classic metal label. Edward Lu, sales director of Confidex Asia Pacific, said the label was chosen because it can flexibly fit different materials and is cost-effective. The tag can be applied to fabric, metal, glass, plastic and wood and has a reading range of 5 to 7 meters with a handheld reader. The unique ID number encoded on each tag is linked in the software to the details of the asset to which the tag is applied.

In this solution, users carry a handheld reader and can indicate the room in which they are reading tag data. Capture the tag ID of each item as you walk through the room. After an asset inventory is completed using a handheld device, the data is uploaded to a server and then shared throughout the company.

Yugo explained that the software resides in Telkomsel's database and manages asset data for all sites, while Cudocomm provides an application for Android-based mobile devices to manage data for handheld readers.

The software can identify when an asset is moved from one location to another, such as a chair assigned to the 15th floor but being identified in a conference room on the 20th floor. If an asset's actual location does not match its assigned location, the software alerts users and management through the app until the asset is relocated. Companies can also access the software to see which floor or even room a tagged asset is on, Tio said.

Cudocomm also provides military customers with weapons tracking solutions, and its asset management solution includes 15 modules. However, Telkomsel only used three of the modules to monitor asset location, asset movement, and data import and export, and linked this information to the company's existing SAP software.

Tio said: "There are two solutions for one tag, RFID and QR code. If RFID is not available, we also have other ways to capture data." For example, scan the QR code with an Android phone and access it through the same electronic product code The asset's identification and history.

Currently, employees use handheld RFID readers in every facility. The company may next introduce stationary readers. Today, the RFID solution has helped Telkomsel save time on each inventory count, increase the number of inventory counts, and obtain more accurate data on each asset and its location status.