Innovators in Sensor Technology and Tracking and Monitoring High Value Assets

Strategic Tracking Solutions (STS) is a sensor technology design and services company

Asset tracking has always presented a challenge to organizations in both the private and public sector.  Historically, organizations have mandated the identification and recording of organizational assets to assure capital expenditures were valid and inventory levels could be determined for operational purposes.  In addition, the identification and control of these capital assets is an essential part of required accounting principles that establish the total value of an organization and annual tax burden.   As organizations grow, the task of asset tracking becomes more difficult to accomplish.   Often expansion involves decentralization of internal processes and necessitates encompassing multiple locations.  Maintaining control of these critical assets can become impossible without either large investments in labor or new technology.  Because additional labor is a reoccurring annual cost, most organizations have turned to technological interventions that present better monetary leverage over a period of years.

Given the many advances in technology over the past 25 years, most organizations have adopted some form of static electronic asset identification.  For example, op-scan devices connected to computer software and hardware have revolutionized inventory control and management.  Through these systems organizational capital assets can also be tagged and recorded.  However advanced these systems are in serving the internal needs of an organization, they are not able to track an asset in motion.  The identification and tracking of an asset that requires movement from one location to another by some form of transport is at least temporarily lost in the transition. In a global economic environment these assets may exist in this transition state more than in static storage.

Further, in the post 9/11 world, the need for proper identification and tracking of transport cargo, particularly import shipments, is a major security issue worldwide.  A breakthrough tagging process and real-time tracking system is needed to fill this asset transition gap. Research indicates a product/system that bridges this gap will present a global market opportunity at least as large as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.