The Melbourne City Council is the local government body responsible for the administration of Melbourne.
The Melbourne City Council operates a fleet of vehicles which are utilised by its employees for short term travel.
The council came to a decision that the previous manual logging of the movement and location of the entire fleet of vehicles was both time consuming and inefficient.
In partnership with Gamma Solutions , the Melbourne City Council investigated the implementation of a fully automated system to replace the old manual process.
“The City of Melbourne has been using RFID technology for nearly 12 months to automate data collection for vehicle usage from its corporate car park.
The RFID system provides accurate data collection of each vehicle entering and departing the car park enabling Council to do away with manual records for asset management keeping” explains Councillor Brian Shanahan, Chair of the Finance and Governance Committee for the City of Melbourne.
The Melbourne City Council has worked previously with Gamma Solutions for using the latter’s Intermec portable label printers for its ticket inspectors. When the Melbourne City Council decided to upgrade its logging system to an automated level, it turned to Gamma Solutions.
“To date the manual system of logging vehicles is both unreliable and fairly inconsistent. By implementing the RFID solution, Melbourne City Council hoped to increase their efficiency and data integrity within the corporate transport office” explained Clem Valdez from Gamma Solutions.
The process of logging each individual vehicle is now replaced by an automated system, saving time and improving worker efficiency. Vehicle logging is now facilitated by the RFID solution, which creates a database of vehicles logged during each day.
Initial testing has been underway since June 1, 2007. The final stage of the project will see the RFID, staff identification and security gates fully integrated.
Importantly, the RFID solution has delivered a clear return on investment for Melbourne City Council.
One of the primary pieces of technology being used in this application is the Intermec IF5 fixed RFID reader. The Intermec IF5 is a fixed smart reader that filters a range of information from tags, monitors external sensors and controls audibility.
The Intermec IF5 manages to do all this without the added expense of an external server box, which most RFID applications require.
The ongoing assistance provided by Gamma Solutions has provided “an end to end solution with the supply of the relevant hardware and software. With qualified RFID specialists the system was designed as to allow for minimal impact to the day to day operations of the business during implementation”, explains Clem Valdez.