Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT

The Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT is one of the University’s largest interdepartmental academic research centers. Sixty principal investigators in RLE—of whom fifty are members of the MIT faculty—direct the Laboratory’s research projects, while over three hundred MIT graduate and undergraduate students make RLE one of the primary environments for student learning at MIT.

The Business Issue

The RLE headquarters staff needed help locating files within their facility. Prior to completion of this project, they had two file rooms—one storing personnel files and the other storing proposal files. The personnel files contain information regarding all of the members of RLE while the proposal files are submitted to outside agencies with the goal of being funded.

Staff would remove files from these rooms whenever needed, without any access control. These files could then sit on their desks for days at a time. This would pose major problems when other workers needed to access those same files because locating them required searching multiple offices within the office.

Our Solution

The management team at RLE wanted a solution that was simple, fast and efficient. Their goal was to have a system which required less than the five to ten seconds it would take users to check out a file using a barcode-based inventory solution. Barcoding Inc. proposed using the CaptureTech RFID Interpreter in conjunction with a custom software application to meet these needs.

All files were consolidated into one room. As users exit the new file room with their files, they stop at a touch screen monitor mounted on the wall; they hold the file up to the Interpreter, which is mounted right next to the monitor and then choose their name from an on-screen listing. The files are then associated with those users. At any time files can be looked up in the web-based system to determine which user was the last to access those files. This eliminated the need for workers to manually search multiple desks to find files.

The Result

““The system that was developed works great; it was exactly what we were looking for.””

Krista Van Guilder
Manager of Media & Design
MIT Reserach Laboratory of Electronics

To learn more about this and other applications, please contact Barcoding Inc.

Download the Case Study PDF