An inevitable thing begins to happen the moment you turn your RTLS system on. The batteries on the tags and badges begin to drain. And they continue to drain until they have no more life to give. When that happens, the value of that awesome infrastructure fades very quickly. As such, one of the seemingly simplest parts of maintaining the system, becomes one of the most critical task to keep the value of the system. Kick that can too far down the road and you will pay a price, in unusable system and loss of confidence, which is very difficult to overcome.
So the answer is to think about it UPFRONT. Make plans to utilize the data provided by the system itself to monitor battery life, and in situations where a loss of RTLS capabilities would be a significant issue, be proactive. Put processes in place to change the batteries in regular intervals, to never risk having your system become functionally shutdown over battery issues.
If you need assistance with this process – our team is here for you. We will continually monitor the battery status of tags and badges, so we can proactively replace them, prior to their depletion. This is a critical element of an RTLS system operational maintenance. When a tag (or a badge) is no longer tracked, due to battery depletion, the replacement of the battery is much more difficult, as it requires looking up the “last seen” location of a tag or a badge and from there trying to locate a depleted tag/badge. A properly run battery replacement program reduces this cumbersome task of searching for “dead” location tags/badges and ensures the highest level of your RTLS system reliability.
And, if you happen to be one of the many hospitals that has let this get away from you… we can help with that too. It’s not as easy as being proactive… but with a team who understands how hospitals operate, how medical equipment looks like, and where it tends to hide, we can manually locate items with dead batteries faster than most anyone, and get your RTLS system back on track.
In addition to our assistance with managing battery replacement, we offer a portfolio of other Operational Support and Maintenance services, as well as Exploration and Planning, Implementation, Optimization, and Managed Services for Real-Time Technologies, including RTLS and RFID solutions, to ensure you gain the value from the solution you own.