The State Attorney's 15th Judicial Circuit Office, located in West Palm Beach, Fla., is a typical, modern office building owned and operated by Palm Beach County. On any given day, there are about 21,000 active felony case files, traversing three different floors, accessed by staff in multiple divisions, and occasionally leaving and entering the building as cases wind through prosecution.
The State Attorney had a business problem -- how best to handle this volume of case files, so they could be quickly located, monitored and tracked, especially given that court calendars change, and case hearing and trial dates can be unexpectedly changed. The demand of the courts and the ability of the office to react to those demands are critical business processes to the State Attorney and his staff.
Locating case files was a systemic problem. It was estimated that approximately 6 percent of the felony cases required staff to stop what they were doing to locate a file. At times, as many as five people might be involved in locating a case file. The time involved varied for locating a file, but it was estimated to average 20 minutes, at an annual cost of about $54,000.
In 2006, the Florida State Attorney's Office sought out systems integrators to help with a case file tracking system feasibility study. After initial discussions with a number of companies, InnerWireless was selected, based on its integrated RFID, RTLS and Wi-Fi asset tracking expertise.
"InnerWireless had successful active tag implementations in hospitals and pledged to provide the engineering and testing to determine if passive RFID tags could be accurately tracked in our large facility," said Dan Zinn, CIO for the Florida State Attorney's Office. "InnerWireless explored passive RFID reader technologies from ThingMagic and proposed a solution. The preliminary test results were encouraging, so we planned a pilot test in our building."
To support the project, Zinn brought together a team consisting of 10 colleagues from the Felony, Information Technology, Intake, and Investigations divisions of the Florida State Attorney's Office. The team was tasked with ensuring the project would benefit the office and respective internal divisions and critical business functions. Zinn and his team worked with representatives from: InnerWireless, representing ThingMagic's RFID technology leadership; Jade Communications, for the system installation; and SimplyRFID, to address label printing and programming, and, the potential addition of a staff ID card location system.
Working together, the team determined the optimal solution would:
--Use the InnerWireless solution as the underlying RTLS platform, allowing users to locate files and personnel, in real time, for increased overall efficiency; and
--Use passive RFID tags and ThingMagic UHF RFID readers for case file tracking, and active tags and Wi-Fi access points to read personnel badges. All tags were confirmed compliant with the DoD-96 identity type, and NIST RFID security standards could be satisfied by isolating RFID network traffic to a Virtual LAN.
The team selected ThingMagic Mercury5 UHF RFID readers for their 100 percent read rates and high performance. ThingMagic Astra readers, to be added in a later stage of the deployment, were chosen for their unobtrusive form factor, PoE functionality, read accuracy and high performance.
Alien Squiggle Generation 2 passive tags were selected for 1" x 4" case file labels using a Zebra R110xi printer/programmer, while Alien active RFID inlays were chosen for personnel badges, to be produced on Zebra P430i printers.
Using the Zebra printing system, 18,000 passive RFID tagged labels were applied to individual case files, while over 300 active tag personnel badges were produced later in the deployment. Each tag's unique ID number was programmed into STAC (a SQL Server-based case management system used by State Attorney and Public Defender offices throughout Florida) and related to the case ID and case number, or specific staffer, respectively. ThingMagic Mercury5 readers were installed onto the concrete within dropped ceilings, and connected to 115V AC outlets and CAT5 cables. Antennas were mounted, and attached to the readers with plenum-rated RF cabling.
ThingMagic RFID readers were integrated with back-end systems including the InnerWireless system, STAC, Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches, and an HP cClass blade server hosting a BEA reader application and the InnerWireless PanGo Locator application.
The InnerWireless PanGo RTLS platform and visibility application gives users real-time visibility, alerts, and analysis about the location and status of key assets. With the integrated system in place, case managers were now able to access the case tracking system on their PCs, locate files in real time, and ensure cases were no longer delayed due to missing files.
Following the initial deployment, SimplyRFID, a Virginia-based developer of supply chain logistics and asset management systems, assumed management of the solution. In a follow-on deployment phase, SimplyRFID installed the ThingMagic Astra readers, to capitalize on their PoE functionality and Wi-Fi integration. The program was then expanded to track about 350 staff, attorneys, and authorized contractors, so they could likewise be located to advance pending cases in a timely manner.
Office email requests, for staff to check their respective work areas for files, have dropped from an average of five or more requests per week to less than one per week.
Zinn asserts the expanded $100,000 system paid for itself in less than 18 months, and that staff morale improvement has been obvious. "We think that this project was an industry breakthrough. The State Attorney took a risk on a new technology. We addressed a mission-critical business problem with an RFID solution that has exceeded the goals identified at the onset of the project. We involved our customers (the staff of the office) and worked with industry leaders, like ThingMagic, to create a successful RFID-enabled document tracking solution," Zinn said.
The State Attorney's 15th Judicial Circuit Office, located in West Palm Beach, Fla., is a typical, modern office building owned and operated by 
