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 six 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.

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.

The Results
“The breadth and performance of ThingMagic’s UHF RFID reader product line were key in our decision to select them for our document management initiatives. The Mercury5 reader
integrated easily with our existing infrastructure – both environmentally and with our back end
systems. As our project has expanded, the ThingMagic Astra reader has provided an elegant
solution that blends in with our facilities, simplifies installation, and lives up to the high level of performance that is needed for our project to deliver ongoing value.”
- Dan Zinn CIO for the Florida State Attorney’s Office

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.