In Florida, RFID system keeps case files under control
June 2nd, 2009
State attorney’s office integrates RFID tags with file-tracking system to follow active case files
The Florida State Attorney’s Office for the 15th Judicial Circuit in Palm Beach County takes on about 120,000 cases a year. “About 20,000 of those are felony cases,” said Dan Zinn, the office’s chief information officer. “That’s where the action is.”
And action was a problem. Keeping track of paper files as they moved through the office and the court system was a big job. If a file could not be found when it was needed in court, it could result in a hearing being delayed or even a case being thrown out.
SIDEBAR: Asset tracking systems: The simpler the better
“It’s not just tracking the files,” Zinn said. “It’s having control of a series of processes.”
His office has taken control of those processes by incorporating passive radio frequency identification tags in its case file labels, putting RFID readers throughout the four floors of office space, and integrating the technology with the office’s computerized videochat and file-tracking system.
“It is a simple technology,” he said. “All that had to be done was for some companies to come together with some software to make it work.”
The solution is composed of InnerWireless middleware called the PanGo Unified Asset Visibility platform; passive RFID tags, printers and programmers from Zebra Technologies Corp.; and readers from ThingMagic.
“This is one of the high-value opportunities” for the maturing field of RFID asset tracking because of the large volume of documents that organizations are tracking, said Greg O’Connell, Zebra’s director of government sales.
“There are a lot of things that people want to track, and there is no one technology that tracks them all,” said Mox Weber, director of product management at InnerWireless, which supplied expertise in asset tracking. The PanGo platform provides a layer of abstraction and an application programming interface that links a variety of RFID tag types on the front end with tracking and management systems on the back end.
The technology might be simple, but the implementation had its challenges. The office had a homegrown file management system, called STAC, developed in the 1990s that sought to use bar codes to track the movement of files. Clerks were supposed to scan the bar code label when they received a file, and that data would be used to update STAC with the file’s location.
“That was nice, but most of the secretaries said they could type faster than the time it took to put the file under the reader,” Zinn said. “It didn’t save them time.” The system was never fully implemented even though the file labels have bar codes. “Why invest in the hardware for bar codes when the users don’t want it?”
The manual system was not used consistently, and attorneys often sent frantic e-mail messages when they couldn’t find a file they needed in court. Then 25 or 30 people would spend 20 minutes or so looking through their offices for the missing documents.
