Barcode/RFID-Integrated BI

DOS mission: slash the time required to retrieve the “needle in a haystack” - i.e., one paper U.S. passport application among millions processed each year and stored at the National Passport Center (In expediting or investigating passport decisions, Congressional offices request these daily.) Creative Federal solution: integrate a barcode scanning system with ODIN Technologies’ RFID and BusinessObjects BI to produce a graphical view of the facility pinpointing the artifact’s zone. Result: a 33% gain in productivity and superior user satisfaction ratings!

The State Department processes millions of paper-based U.S. passport applications each year. It gets requests each day from congressional offices to either expedite an application or to investigate why a passport application was denied. Historically, A huge amount of administrative overhead was necessitated by teams of customer service specialists working to find and retrieve these documents that were stored in the National Passport Center where they were being processed. State sorely needed a labor-saving system that could effectively shorten the cycle time for search and retrieval of documents, while minimizing any impact to their current processes and systems.

Creative Federal specialists came up with an innovative way to integrate State’s legacy barcode scanning system with the RFID technology from ODIN Technologies and tie it all together with a BusinessObjects BI application, which presents a graphical view of the storage facility detailed down to the zone where any given passport document is located. The Creative Federal-developed solution—now, for the first time accessible through State’s internal network—has resulted in a 33% gain in productivity for this process. In a user satisfaction survey conducted after the solution’s release and after users had completed an average of 500 searches a month for several months, the Creative Federal-developed RFID/barcode system received superior ratings in both accuracy and system usability.