Internet of Things Case Study presented at NY IT Roadmap NY NY : Taming a tidal wave of paper with RFID tags and sensors. Noted version of Michael R Hoffman's keynote innovation presentation showing how using now-affordable, much less than the cost of a postage stamp, RFID tags and sensors modernize and digitize labor intensive, paper intensive processes. Hoffman explains how the fusion of digital and physical realms spawns new services, improved customer experience, cost and resource efficiencies and spawns numerous additional innovation opportunities
24. Cyber Custodian Links Big Data, Internet of Things,
Analytic Engines to Contracts
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Editor's Notes
First, thank you for getting to the Javits Center, in NY so early in the morning – Thank you for participating in this physical presentation. Thank you for attending the real time, interactive, face to face experience.
Please take advantage of being present – being here – in the last row or the first row – lever the real physical, interactive person to person experience – this is not a webinar or a podcast – we can interact –
Has anyone noticed that we are using a little ER on this slide? Some enhanced reality?
Do you see us here – in the room on the map in the logo slide?
This is part of what are talking about today, the benefits of layering physical and digital and enhancements to change our businesses, to change our outcomes. In the case study I am going to walk through, I will show you how we create tremendous process efficiencies, enhanced customer experiences, improved security and location and information certainty leveraging RFID – radio frequency identification tags to digitally connect physical documents, paper and the information on paper, to an entire ecosystem of stakeholders – physical, present stakeholders along the document lifecycle and virtual, digital stakeholders accessing the information, location and metadata via mobile-first-designed applications we’ve written to provide continuous awareness, process transparency, end user confidence and compliance and regulatory governance.
Hoffman does the anxiety and reality check?
It is early in NY – And I want to confirm that we are all in the right room at the right conference –
So here are the items we are discussing around the internet of things, RFID, Radio frequency identification and the fusion of digital and physical dimensions.
This digital and physical fusion is what’s new here, linking physical paper and digital markers in physical space, physical AND digital – Representing the same documents to stakeholders physically in the location and linking these physical documents and local and remote stakeholders via software and dashboards and alerts via mobile…this is what we are going to quickly talk about.
Walk through each of the items at high level – explain tags, readers, passive RFID, combination barcode and RFID readers, bulk readers sensors and tease the multi-million dollar savings per audit process achieved via simply RFID tagging the folders.
Point to where we are in the Javits Center and that anyone could track us now via HTML5 and location services on our phones, or the cameras, sensors, satellites etc. that provide digital maps of this physical space…all these layers come together and are tied to the physical and mathematical – latitude, longitude, altitude, geospatial and proximity references and markers – Oh…and we are just looking at Google
Does going to satellite and depicting the room spaces makes this more real? Notice the 3D option and the ability to zoom and layer – all of this comes together in a very simple use case.
You see, I walked past the NYPD Tow Pound where the NYC ferry arrives just north, adjacent to the dock – As I walked, my bag was open and I my book fell out and my ID and my presentation for this morning …which thank goodness, were all tagged with these RFID tags –{hold up and show, describe the RFID tags ] -…Can you see where this is going?
So when I ask my friend Google to ‘find my papers’, and Google knows who I am and I had registered my tags – in this case active RFID - I can see my papers, which have formed a breadcrumb trail from my trip walking to the Javits from the ferry dock.
This is not hard – or complicated –
Got it?
Now let’s go to our business use case…
How many people here have a mortgage? Raise your hand?
Remember this day – see how happy, how hopeful the couple is – …
The people are not what I want you to focus on.
I want you to look at the stack of papers in the blue folder – the mortgage documents – the forty to sixty pages in the folder.
Did you ever wonder what happens to all those papers after you sign them and the lawyers and bankers put all the required documents together? Well, they go some where – and they need to be retrievable for the next 10, 30, 40 years…(explain)
In our case, those files end up someplace like this. Nice right –well lit, clean, simple – this space is literally the size of an airplane hanger – 50 foot ceilings and large enough for a couple football fields… so when we put folders in..
The space fills up fast when we put 12-14 million mortgages in here - each mortgage with 40 to 100 or so pages, multiple folders – roughly a billion sheets of paper – can you find your folder in here?
This is our business, protecting the physical folder and the information contained in the folder – this is the document custody business
Remember the blue folder? We are responsible for the lifecycle of the folder and its contents - so when someone requests the mortgage, let’s say for a refinancing or loan modification or our family is selling the house – we have SLA’s that dictate how quickly we must deliver the physical documents to a stakeholder. We are also responsible for knowing who has access to the documents and the confidential information which we access for audits, verification and regulatory purposes
Security – ensuring a folder doesn’t leave the building or move from a protected area is part of the RFID benefit – local alarms and lights can go off to show a documents movement
But in addition to detecting when a document is leaving the building – we need location certainty – the ability to quickly verify, locate and retrieve a document
Remember, this is a football field size space – finding a document and walking a 150 yards to retrieve it and bring it back to a desk or a shipping box is expensive – costing time and resource – So we said, what if we could put GPS on every folder? Remember the digital trail to the Javits center – what if we could do something like that
And it would look something like this for anyone that has access, security and permission rights – they could virtually, digitally see where there document was in the building, what shelf, what slot – and they could have single click access to the document contents…
So now we have added, “find my keys” “find my phone” type functionality to paper documents.
Anxiety about losing folders and files is the number one pain point cited by customers in this business according to an annual Xerox study on document custody. The GPS like functionality eliminates client’s greatest fear.
Here’s the big picture, the high level vision of how this comes together.
Walk through components and additional revenue opportunities, partnerships, customer experience benefits achieved fusing digital and physical realms.
So we created software, workflow, dashboards, processes that track and alert the physical and digital dimensions and provide mobile first access to end users based on their credentials and functional role.
Along the bottom here, from left to right – you see a representation of the lifecycle of a document from the moment it arrives at the loading dock – which is actually preceded by a shipping manifest – we open the box, put on a label embedded with an passive RFID tag – the tag in the label is the size of a grain of pepper – and the rest of the label contains an antennae for detection by the hand scanner and mounted sensors in the facility. The RFID tagged folders are then returned to a box that is also RFID tagged or placed on the shelf – and detectable and findable by scanner, mobile device and virtually via software
This graphic depicts some of the areas we see benefiting from RFID tagging folders – notice that folders movement from station to station from shelf to desk for review back to shelf. Notice that the people working with the folders can be tracked and measured – so we can create performance bonuses for quality and efficiency where we did not have measures before. For compliance and risk and client/stakeholders peace-of-mind, we can track the path of a document through and around our facilities.
Notice I said facilities, plural, now we can have a consolidated view of all our locations and process through a single pane of glass – a view of like-for-like process and resource comparisons and metrics so we can recognize and replicate best practices.
Now everything can be measrued
One click using a combination bar code reader, rfid reader links physical, digital and data together to drive the entire operation – registering and synchronizing the ‘document’ in each domain.
With everything metered and measurable we are now able to monitor the health of each process, entity, document flowing through the ecosystem, using alerts to detect errors and anomalies, identifying optimal and suboptimal process paths and identifying areas for performance monetization.
One example leveraging the digital data flow shows how we can use the digital shipping manifest that shows the files in route from a client, that we can count and match to our HR staff count for the following day – This app alerts managers that they are over staffed or under staffed based on tomorrow’s volume and can automatically adjust staff scheduling.
The benefits of marrying digital and physical dimensions are enormous and we are only just beginning to understand how far reaching enhanced reality (adding chips), digitization and advanced technologies can take us. For example we can use enhanced reality similar to this screen to help employees locate files via optimal path routing algorithms – and a bigger benefit, is that path routing using smart glasses that also have an earpiece/speaker and a camera, can provide instructions in English, Spanish and other languages which dramatically grows our hiring pool and our global location options. We are also considering scanning inventory using sensor equipped drones (multi-story open facility) and using cameras to capture and verify images in the aisle, at the shelf – reducing the required transport to workstation time.
This solution opens a stream of client benefits and additional revenue stream opportunities – and yes, block chain, AI and other quickly emerging technologies and concepts also benefit this fused digital and physical design.