A scientific laboratory in Texas is concerned about tracking equipment and materials moving in and out of a clean room environment. Their existing process was to manually log each Item before it was brought into the room and after the Item exited the room. Although this procedure was performed by their staff and followed with diligence, occasionally mistakes and omissions occurred.

By assigning an RFID tag to each Item and adding a single standalone TurnStone handheld reader, the lab reduced logging time requirements, increased accuracy of log reports and increased quantity of data that can be used for more detailed reports regarding the activity of the specific clean room. Overall hardware and software cost was less than $5,000 and the first month time savings alone justified the expense.

A clothing designer is concerned about lower quality counterfeit goods being produced oversees and introduced into the supply-chain as legitimate and authentic product. These fake goods were undermining the designer’s overall profitability and because of their lower quality, negatively impacting customer perception of the designer’s goods.

The solution was to embed an RFID tag into each of the real articles being manufactured and encoding into that RFID tag a unique serial number that is then held in the private secure TurnStone database. As goods are received domestically, they are scanned and the RFID information is checked against the private secure TurnStone database. If the RFID Tag isn’t present or doesn’t match the expected RFID Tag information, the Item is determined to be fake and the shipment is refused. A TurnStone RFID Tag Writer was added to each production line, access to the private secure cloud database was needed for each of the writers and TurnStone handheld readers with access to the same private secure cloud database was required at the point of delivery. Overall implementation costs were under $150,000 and overall savings for the first year are estimated to be in the millions.

A county in a southwestern state is required by law to account for all equipment purchased on an annual basis. The IT Department of the county traditionally would publish a list of all the computer equipment assigned to each person and distribute that personalized list to each employee or department head. It was then the employee’s responsibility to find all the equipment that was assigned to them or account for its whereabouts. The process effectively shut down county operations for a week while everyone went looking for everything. The annual cost of this manual inventory was estimated at nearly $500,000 in labor costs.

Implementation of TurnStone – assigning an RFID tag to each Item in each office, building the Item catalog organized by office and synchronizing the Item catalog across multiple handheld scanners – resulted in a cost savings the first year of $210,000 and estimated additional year cost savings of over $400,000.

A company that rents equipment used at construction sites was concerned aboout reconciliation of records relating to equipment ordered, equipment delivered and equipment returned. Although, the company thinks that the ordered equipment was delivered, the customer would say that it wasn’t. Sometimes, the customer would claim that equipment was collected and the rental company wouldn’t have any record of the actual date that the return occurred.

Implementing TurnStone, adding metal-mount RFID Tags to each piece of equipment, building an Item catalog and supplying handheld scanners to yard managers and delivery trucks allows each piece of equipment to be scanned and associated with customers and orders. The time and date information for each Item scanned replaced the handwritten records and provides management with better oversight and more accurate reports. Overall implementation costs were less than $100,000 and in the first year helped save the company over $500,000 in disputed charge credits.

Between runs, ambulance crews often inventory the medical supplies that are present and restock the Items that were used on the last run. These records are a critical part of the emergency response billing process and need to be accurate. A hospital in New Mexico has adopted TurnStone to make this process more efficient and less time consuming. Each consumable supply is affixed with an RFID tag at the time that it is received at the hospital. As those supplies are distributed to the individual ambulances, they are scanned and a record of which ambulance received which supplies is created. As those supplies are used, the empty packaging for the supplies is scanned and those records are associated with the patient the supplies were used to treat.

Initial TurnStone implementation consisted of several handheld scanners at receiving and several handheld scanners in the ambulance bay – each of which is connected to the hospital’s private secure TurnStone cloud database. Not including RFID Tag stickers for the supplies, the hospital’s initial cost was less than $75,000 and first year savings in inventory time is estimated at over $250,000.

A custom furniture manufacturer in New England was interested in providing their customers with more information about the progress of ordered pieces. Their production process involves a sequence of stations starting with the arrival of the raw materials (hardwood) through jointing and into to final assembly, packaging and ultimately shipping. At each step in the process, management wanted to send an alert message to the customer letting them know how far along their order is and when they should expect to receive it.

By installing TurnStone, the manufacturer utilized a handheld scanner to Enroll the raw materials and associate those with the customer’s order. Then at each station, the handheld scanner is used to log the location of materials that make up the order. Each time TurnStone sees that the Enrolled materials move to a new station, an email is sent to the customer letting them know the progress of their order. Additionally, downline production stations are made aware of what to expect and management can generate reports regarding the amount of time required to build each finished piece – from cutting the hardwood to the right size, jointing the pieces together, sanding, staining, finishing, adding hardware, assembly, gluing, curing, packaging and ultimately shipping.

A regional medical center in New Mexico spent a fair amount of time looking for medical equipment that had gone “missing.” The equipment was still on the premises but exactly where it had been used last and where it was moved to was generally unknown and frequently the staff would be required to search the hallways, closets and waiting rooms for IV machines, wheelchairs and beds.

Their use of TurnStone’s Radar / Geiger Counter feature allows them to minimize the time required looking for these “missing” Items. Each piece of equipment that can be moved was affixed with an RFID Tag and then Enrolled into their own private secure TurnStone cloud database. Handheld RFID Readers running the TurnStone software were distributed to various areas within the medical center. As Items are moved from location to location, their new location is logged by the handheld readers. When the staff needs to find a specific Item or an Item that is part of a class of Items, they select that Item on the handheld screen and the TurnStone Radar application alerts them when the Item is seen and in which direction it is located.

A boutique store for women’s apparel was experiencing shoplifting and shrinkage principally coming from their loosely monitored changing rooms. Shoplifters would enter the changing room claiming that they had only 2 or 3 Items to try on and instead had hidden additional Items. Once inside the changing room they would remove the bulky theft-detection tags, conceal the additional Items underneath their existing outfits and then exit the store wearing the items that they were stealing. These losses monthly were “tens of thousands of dollars.”

Upon adopting TurnStone, the boutique installed an RFID Tag onto each of the price tags for each of the Items being sold and an additional RFID Tag onto each of the reusable theft-detection tags. These two tags were linked to each other inside the TurnStone Item catalog when new Items were Enrolled. At each of the sales counters, a tabletop RFID Reader (ACC-809) was installed and used to validate that the reusable theft-detection tags belonged to the same Item as the price tag. Handheld scanners were provided to scan the changing rooms and the customers entering and exiting the changing rooms to count the number of Items being tried on. For less than $10,000 in equipment and software, the boutique eliminated shrinkage resulting from shoplifting.

A high-end jeweler in Ohio would perform a manual inventory annually. This process involved them closing the store to customers, removing each piece of jewelry from the display cases and individually comparing the SKU printed on the price tag with a master list of SKUs for the jewelry on hand and then return each piece to the display case and arrange the pieces as they had been arranged before the inventory process was started. Typically, this inventory would take 400 man hours to perform and after examining the resulting 26-page variance report they would realize nearly $80,000 in lost merchandise.

When they adopted TurnStone, the receiving department Enrolled each Item received by printing their existing price tags onto an RFID Tag with the same form-factor and linking the RFID Tag number with the Item’s SKU inside their own private secure TurnStone cloud database. TurnStone Handheld RFID Readers were provided to the merchandise department to scan the display cases and back stock areas without disrupting the Items contained within. Initial implementation costs and system upgrade costs combined were less than $75,000. A full inventory is now performed monthly, requires less than 24 hours of labor, results in a 1/2-page variance report and nearly no shrinkage. Ongoing case counts are performed daily and neither the inventory or the case counts impact customers or sales operations.