Upgrading Sports Equipment Management With RFID Technology - ActiveGo Essay.

Choosing RFID Technology for Upgradation

ActiveGo has been providing sports equipment and facilities to the customer are looking for upgradation of their system by including a new ICT solution developed for managing their audience and tracking equipment. The paper provides the background of the system described along with the chosen ICT technology for upgradation, additional activities and assumptions and their contribution to the system. Next, a rich picture explains the boundary, a system vision document describing the problem, system capabilities and anticipated business. Further, stakeholder analysis is done to understand the role of the stakeholders in the existing and new system to be built. Lastly, an event table is described to list the meaningful events information of the new system with events identified, type and name of the event, source, triggers, actions and outputs.

ActiveGo is one of the local sports equipment hire services offering a wide range of products for rental facilities. The Company offers a wide range of sports equipment and different packs containing similar equipment. The Company is now paper-based, conducting and recording services in a traditional management approach. The Company aims to grow its audience by tapping into new markets and adopting new ICT solutions to improve equipment and delivery services tracking. The Company has the various location for performing storage operations. The packs of equipment are stored in these locations and managed accordingly. The Company wants a new system that would help them systematically manage damaged, incomplete and complete products to improve functionalities.

The chosen technology for improving the operations of managing equipment and growing customer base of ActiveGo would be Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. RFID is a wireless system that helps the organization contain readers and tags. The system has a device working as a reader with several antennas that can emit radio waves and receive the signals from the RFID tags located in equipment and employees for efficient tracking and control (Keerthan 2021). The tags used are passive tags that the readers control without any power (Myint and Tun 2020). The RFID tags store information about the product needed to be tracked. The Company can apply the RFID technology to significantly improve the facilities of inventory control, tracking equipment, personnel tracking, and providing data for the database (Tsai et al. 2019). Stocks and assets are managed to significantly improve the Company's supply chain, meeting customers' demand. RFID tags are tracked in real-time to detect transactions, inventory levels, and stocks.

The specific additions required in the system need to confirm the assumptions made. The required assumptions for the system would be:

Assumption 1: There is no need to outsource new members other than a developer as the existing members are skilful enough to understand the RFID technology.

Assumption 2:  The Company has the resources to develop this system in-house (Sivasankar, Soundararajan and Rajeswari 2020).

Assumption 3: The members know how to handle the issues during development.

The Company's main aim is to develop an equipment tracking system to improve the functionalities in tracking stocks and employees. The additional activities that the system needs to perform are documentation of a weekly report that signifies the complete and incomplete type of equipment packs and record the pack's location. The Company is also looking to return deposits automatically to the customers who return their product undamaged to the Company or attach a late fee if the pack doesn’t return in time.

System Requirements and Assumptions

The information on the case study is analysed from researching relevant data about the new RFID system and the assumptions made. The first assumption is understood by conducting interviews with the members to understand the various aspect and the knowledge of the employees according to the assumption made to clarify the fact (Fabricio de Barros and Johnson 2020). The Company's resources should be checked to signify clarity to the in-house development of the RFID technology. The risk assessment is done to understand the issues that can occur in adopting the new technology, clarifying the assumption of handling any issue.

[Figure 1: Rich Picture of ActiveGo, Source: Author 2022]

The boundary of this new RFID system that the Company is not adding on right now is tracking the individual components of the packs of product present. The Company is tagging their product packs, not the content inside the pack. Tagging the product like a pack containing similar contents is beneficial for the Company as individual contents have more chances of getting lost than the complete pack.

Problem Description:

Sports equipment hire service, ActiveGo, is looking to upgrade their traditional paper-based systems by developing an Information and communication technology that should help ActiveGo manage their growing audience tapping into new markets and tracking equipment. The Company needs to create reports for damaged packs and the storage location of these packs. The system should provide control of equipment inventory, tracking the various packs at locations and tracking the employees providing data for the database. The return of equipment packs by the customers is needed to be tracked for an automatic refund with the proper delivery of the product to the Company or imposing a late fee if the returns did not come within the expected deadline.   

System Capabilities:

RFID technology has unique sets of capabilities operating over wireless communications. Used for tracking equipment and personnel. The main capabilities of the RFID technology are:

The RFID system helps understand the approaches for reading and writing new data without direct contact with the employees and equipment.

The RFID tag consists of a unique ID to identify individual equipment and personnel.

There is an automatic recognition of tags by the reader.

There is no need for batteries in Passive tags where the tags can be activated with the reader's help (Chowdhury et al. 2020).

The tags help in the detection of hidden objects.

The system can detect multiple tags at once.  

Anticipated benefits:

The benefits of the proposed ICT technology is:

• Tracking assets and stocks and managing inventories (Doss, Trujillo-Rasua and Piramuthu 2020).
• Saving cost and time with the help of automation
• Better operational and production efficiencies.
• More in-depth management of information leads to customer satisfaction and improved revenue.
• Enhancing the abilities to facilitate improved quality of service and better traceability.
• Checking whether the product is damaged or not.

List of stakeholders:

[Table 1: List of the stakeholders and description, Source: Author 2022]

The types of classes of stakeholders are:-

User as the stakeholders: The buyers who use the products provided by the Company.

Governance by the stakeholders: The group of individuals who helps in managing how things are conducted in the Company.

Influencers as the stakeholders: The influencers have the power of influencing decisions and changing directions of operation in the Company.

Providers as the stakeholders: The providers facilitate the Company's product to be sold to the users.

Benefits of Proposed ICT Technology

[Table 2: Classification of the stakeholders, Source: Author 2022]

A stakeholder identified for the existing system is the Customers that are “User as the stakeholder” who are beneficial to the current services offered by the Company being an “external stakeholder” to the Company. The Customers are classified as the external stakeholder that uses the benefits provided by the Company (Markovic and Bagherzadeh 2018). The customers do not directly work for the Company and get affected by the Company's outcomes or actions. The customer has indirect involvement with the Company may be through some agreement, interest in the products, or interest in the Company's impact.

The Company needs to add the services of a developer for the Company to create the RFID system. The developer is focused on managing the processes of development of the new system to effectively meet the customers' expectations. The developer is motivated to conduct research to gain additional resources, develop the proposal of the product and design the whole process. The developer is an internal shareholder working as the Governance of the new system, providing knowledge on design development.

The identified events for the new system are:-

-Increased visibility of business supply chain

-Equipment tracking

-Track location

-Tracking inventory level.

-Weekly report of incomplete product

-Automatic return of deposit fee

-Charging late fees

-Delivery management

-Tracking incomplete products

-Track locations

[Table 3: The Event table with RFID events, Source: Author 2022]

Conclusion: 

ActiveGo is one of the local sports equipment hiring services looking to upgrade their system from traditional paper-based systems to an information and communication technology solution managing its audience growth and target market to improve its equipment tracking facilities. The new solution that the Company should adopt should improve their current business functionalities and develop a better understanding of the Company's current position. The paper describes the background of the system and radio frequency identification (RFID) as the chosen technology to improve the system. Next, a Rich picture is provided to describe the situation, and the system vision document comprises problem description, capabilities of the system and benefits from the system. Further, stakeholder analysis describes the role of the stakeholders in the new system. Finally, the important events of the RIFD system are listed in an event table with event names, sources, triggers, inputs and outputs.   

References: 

Atkins, R., Sener, A. and Russo, J., 2021. A Simulation for Managing Retail Inventory Flow Using RFID and Bar Code Technology. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 19(3), pp.214-223.

Chowdhury, B.D.B., Masoud, S., Son, Y.J., Kubota, C. and Tronstad, R., 2020. A dynamic data driven indoor localisation framework based on ultra high frequency passive RFID system. International Journal of Sensor Networks, 34(3), pp.172-187.

Doss, R., Trujillo-Rasua, R. and Piramuthu, S., 2020. Secure attribute-based search in RFID-based inventory control systems. Decision Support Systems, 132, p.113270.

Fabricio de Barros, V. and Johnson, S., 2020. A Framework for RFID Compatibility in a Fashion Retail Supply Chain: A Case Study in a Swedish Fashion Retailer.

Keerthan, K.S., 2021. Rfid Based Exam Paper Leakage Protection System. Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT), 12(11), pp.5005-5011.

Markovic, S. and Bagherzadeh, M., 2018. How does breadth of external stakeholder co-creation influence innovation performance? Analyzing the mediating roles of knowledge sharing and product innovation. Journal of Business Research, 88, pp.173-186.

Myint, H. and Tun, M.Z., 2020. Secure Door Control System Using RFID Card. International Journal of Advances in Scientific Research and Engineering, 6(04), pp.69-73.

Sivasankar, V., Soundararajan, E. and Rajeswari, S., 2020. Challenges and impacts of RFID technology in a research library. In Advances in Communication Systems and Networks (pp. 557-570). Springer, Singapore.

Tsai, M.H., Pan, C.S., Wang, C.W., Chen, J.M. and Kuo, C.B., 2019. RFID medical equipment tracking system based on a location-based service technique. Journal of Medical and Biological Engineering, 39(1), pp.163-169.

Wenjun, G., 2021, July. Design and implementation of asset management system based on RFID. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Power, Intelligent Computing and Systems (ICPICS) (pp. 579-583). IEEE.