Property Control is responsible for ensuring an accurate inventory of U-M’s capital equipment. Capital equipment is defined as any equipment with an original cost of $5,000 or more and a useful life of one year or more.
Last summer, Property Control and Financial Operations began partnering with HCA Asset Management, LLC to inventory and retag all U-M capital equipment. As part of this effort, capital equipment was outfitted with new Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The new tags are passive frequency tags, meaning they do not emit a signal and do not cause interference with other technology. Moving forward, the RFID technology will be used to track equipment during biennial inventories and perform spot checks throughout the year.
The scope of the retagging effort included roughly 25,000 assets in nearly 500 buildings across the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses. As of the end of April, over 97 percent of the assets were located and tagged. Minor reconciliation is still being performed with a few departments, but the majority of the data has been loaded into the Asset Management System, and now appears on Business Objects queries.
If you have any questions about the project, please feel free to reach out to Property.Info@umich.edu. Thank you for your continued support!
This article was originally published on the U-M Procurement Services website.
