A courier and records management firm located in Shah Alam is claiming a world first: That it is ahead of all other companies in its field in using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to store, manage, and retrieve documents.

Sure-Reach Records Management Sdn Bhd grew out of the company’s original business — a worldwide courier service that began in 2003.

Peter Chan, co-founder and group ­managing director, as well as his wife Sharon Wong, founder and group executive director, decided to get into the records management business to complement their courier ­business.

Document storage requires buying or ­renting space dedicated just for storage, which is expensive in major cities — and which is where the demand for a records management service is greatest, Chan said.

It also requires specialised equipment, and temperature- and humidity-controlled ­environments to protect paper documents from damage by fire, flood, fungal infestation and pests.

But merely warehousing documents is pointless if they cannot be retrieved quickly and easily when needed. Sure-Reach uses passive RFID tags, imported from the United States and South Korea, which cost 30 cents to 50 cents (roughly 95sen to RM1.60) each.

The tags are embedded into sticky labels, which are then attached to boxes containing sealed-up documents, or to individual files.

The middleware for the RM2mil project was provided by Microsoft Corp and the ­software, together with project consultancy services by Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn Bhd. The application is a proven one for records management, supplied by software developer ONeil of Australia.

No other company in the world has ­implemented such a solution, according to Chan and Wong. “We put RFID tags on ­everything here, be it files, boxes or media. Other companies just tag media like spools of tape and disks, or they might be considering tagging shipments of specific products like medicines or semiconductors,” Chan said.

The RFID tags are an advance over ­barcoding, the prevalent technology of the past 25 years. In order to read a barcode tag and identify the tagged item, a barcode ­scanner must be passed directly over the tag.

If, for reasons of space, the box cannot be stacked in a way that keeps its barcode label exposed, it must be unstacked to have the label scanned.

Stocktaking also becomes a tedious chore when one client’s boxes are mixed in with another’s, as usually happens in a storage facility. “It is impractical to store each client’s boxes of documents separately, especially if the boxes arrive in batches at irregular ­intervals,” Wong explained.

These contraints can make barcodes ­difficult to use in individually labelling stored items. But to read an RFID tag, it needs only to pass within several feet of a scanner, without close physical contact or even line of sight.

Boxes need not be organised in separate stacks for each client, or unstacked for ­scanning.

When a stack of boxes is transported on a pallet, the pallet only needs to be wheeled past an RFID scanner installed in a doorway which identifies all the boxes individually, even the ones in the middle of the stack, in a single pass.

The software can even detect if a box does not belong in a stack, if a box is missing from a stack, or if an extra box has been added by mistake. “If you tell us to come pick up 10 boxes from your premises and we wind up with nine or 11, we can account for the extra or missing box,” Chan said.

“Sure-Reach is about to go live with the RFID solution in a few days at its storage ­facility in Shah Alam. The site can store up to 500,000 cartons and one million file folders.

“We also plan to open storage sites — in Kota Kinabalu this August, and in Kuching this coming January — that would also implement the solution,” Chan said.

“Once the implementation is successful and costs have come down, Sure-Reach will consider using it in its courier business,” he added.

Sure-Reach is able to offer its clients complete auditability of storage down to the box or document level, as well as quick retrieval for every box of documents in ­storage and for files which are individually tagged, said Chan.

Depending on their need and location, clients may request next-day, same-day, or one-hour delivery of items or documents retrieved from storage.

But as an alternative to retrieving hard copy, Sure-Reach offers a document imaging service that makes it possible to retrieve soft copies of documents in storage.

“Most of the time, only the information on the document is wanted. Originals are usually ­needed only for court submissions or ­applications to government agencies,” Chan said.

Sure-Reach can scan documents as they come in, before they are stored. Clients can access the scanned documents through a password-protected website.

What lies on the horizon for Sure-Reach? Aside from coverng the whole nation, Chan and Wong talked about ­expanding their ­document management business to ­elsewhere in the Asean region, for a start.

Singapore, where buying or renting ­property to store documents would be ­particularly expensive — and would thus have more demand for records storage and management services — could be served by a facility across the causeway in Johor, ­according to Chan.

“As a long-term plan, we’re thinking about integrating Sure-Reach’s system with our clients’ archival systems, creating an end-to-end records management solution. But that would require a lot of work to knit the systems together,” he said.

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