Albis Technologies develops and markets a wide range of innovative electronic systems. For many years, clients from the telecommunications, industrial, logistics, security, power supply and medical sectors have put their trust in the expertise of its 180 highly qualified staff. One of Albis’ business units is Zone Monitoring & Find, which enables monitoring and asset tracking in buildings, warehouses, airports, etc. through the use of active RFID. Zillion spoke with Peter Lietha and Zeno Stämmer. Although Albis, in the form that it has today, was established fairly recently, the company already has a long history to fall back on. Mr. Lietha: “In 1971, Siemens Zürich and Albiswerke Zürich merged to become Siemens-Albis AG. In order to focus on its core business, Siemens last year spun off the ‘Engineering and Innovative Products’ business unit via a management buyout.” Mr. Lietha and Mr. Stämmer were both participants in the buyout. Mr. Stämmer is now leading the business unit Zone Monitoring & Find. He is responsible for sales, product management, and product family development for that unit. Mr. Lietha is a member of the Supervisory Board, and is also responsible for Corporate Communications. Albis is organised into four business units: Telecommunications, Zone Monitoring & Find (ZOMOFI), Research & Development, and the Certification Laboratory. ZOMOFI enables zone monitoring and asset tracking in buildings, warehouses, airports, campus areas and of vehicles through the use of active RFID. The RFID components locate and track objects in real time and are used mainly for challenging materials and critical applications where failure is not an option. These include managing containers and load carriers in the logistics sector, positioning people inside hospitals, tracking and managing railway cars, securing works of art and ensuring enhanced access control for businesses. “We have a product that is best-in-class when it comes to performance for reading and writing distances. Another beneficial feature is its long battery life of four to seven years, which is very important in active RFID,” says Mr. Stämmer. The ZOMOFI solution includes tags, sensor tags and controllers. The reading and writing range of up to 160 m in free space is achieved with the ZOMOFI controller (without extensive antenna technology). The anti-collision mechanism allows for a thousand tags to be simultaneously present in the range of one single controller. Hundreds of controllers can be networked. Active RFID can save businesses and organisations time and money. Studies conducted in the US show that the utilisation of instruments in hospitals, for instance, can be improved by more than 20% when finding them becomes easy and the departments stop hoarding their devices. Even when return on investment is merely based on better utilisation of devices and not on project delays and personnel costs for searching for a lost item, ROI is typically achieved within a year. top - home