Using RFID Technology for Supporting Document

Management

Thierry Bodhuin, Rosa Preziosi and Maria Tortorella

RCOST - Research Centre on Software Technology

Department of Engineering, University of Sannio

Via Traiano, Palazzo ex-Poste – 82100, Benevento, Italy

Abstract. Integrating RFID and document management systems can provide a

better awareness regarding the state of the enterprise context and, then, bring

new benefits. The activity flow characterizing a business process depends on

the moving of a definite sequence of paper documents from a given organiza-

tion’s office to another one. If the document circulation is monitored and man-

aged by using RFID technology, additional data can be captured from the or-

ganization information system enriching the set of data produced by a tradi-

tional document management system. By extracting information from this data,

an organization can improve its knowledge regarding its activity flows. As a re-

sult, less time for performing a business process is spent, capability to planning

and make decision increases, evaluation errors decreases and economic advan-

tages are obtained. This paper describes an RFID design, addressing this thesis.

1 Introduction

Current business process automation systems are focused on the activities of a busi-

ness process rather than on the involved business entities, such as documents and

persons. These entities are not monitored and the impact on the information system of

the widespread mobility and traceability of the enterprise resources is not considered.

Information does not always exist regarding their causal relations, topographical

localization and movement in the surrounding space. Therefore, uncertainty exists

regarding business processes. Planning and decisions making capability reduces and

evaluation errors increase. Likewise, business process executors consume more time

for performing their tasks and customer satisfaction decreases. Document manage-

ment area is sensible to these drawbacks. Even if organizations have automated their

business processes and provided them a global visibility, they continue to use paper

documents often representing central business entities of the organization. A major

control on their causal relations and circulation improves the organization’s business.

Document management is emerging as an important IT issue for improving busi-

ness processes. It represents an integral part of business continuity planning area and

requires the integration and management of existing and new technologies in innova-

tive solutions. A transition from traditional documents to digital ones is taking place,

and standard ways for electronically managing documents are diffusing. XML or

Bodhuin T., Preziosi R. and Tortorella M. (2007).

Using RFID Technology for Supporting Document Management.

In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on RFID Technology - Concepts, Applications, Challenges, pages 14-24

DOI: 10.5220/0002433000140024

 SciTePress

PDF formats are examples. However, digitalization is not always suitable. Some

documents having legal value must be recorded, kept and inventoried in the paper

format, and cannot be completely replaced by digital documents. Technologies, such

as bar codes, can be used. It supports recording and inventorying tasks, but it is not

useful for documents tracking. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology

permits to overcome this limitation. Multiple RFID tags can be read once and they

can be detected without passing each document on a scanner as for the bar code. In

addition, an RFID tag can keep useful information in its on-board memory and be

used for detecting and tracking the document.

The integration of RFID and document management systems brings the following

new benefits to the organizations: (a) enrichment of the organization knowledge with

information obtained from the tracking of RFID tagged documents; (b) enhancement

of the global visibility of an organization, as remote authorized users can monitor the

procedures involving RFID tagged documents; (c) new opportunities for RFID-based

services and administrative e-services. An automatic ubiquitous system integrating

the RFID technology has a certain intelligence level useful for supervising the activi-

ties carried out in the organization hosting it. It allows an authorized user to discover

problems in the expected status of its requests in a business process, as documents are

not anymore disconnected from the company information system. For instance, an

employee can search a document and ask information regarding it without moving

from his desk, even if the document has not been digitalized. Moreover, all the docu-

ments related to a specific topic or project can be quickly found. Periodic report can

be generated for indicating outdated documents to be localized and cancelled from

the company archives. Currently, RFID technology and document management are

not widely integrated. Indeed, many organizations still have doubts regarding the real

benefits and require evaluation, case studies with empirical evidence before adopting

the RFID technology. This paper investigates the challenges RFID introduces for the

document processing. In particular, this work aims at solving some malfunctions in

the public administrations and at supporting the interest of the National Center for

Computing in the Public Administration (CNIPA), in Italy, with reference to the

adoption of the RFID technology [3]. With this in mind, an approach using the RFID

technology for document management is proposed. In addition, a business case is

proposed .

In the following, Section 2 considers drawbacks, benefits of the RFID technology.

Section 3 introduces the business case, Section 4 describes the proposed RFID solu-

tion, Section 5 discusses its deployment. Conclusions are given in the last section.

2 Drawbacks and Benefits of RFID Technology

RFID technology supports a variety of application contexts. Its broad applicability

favored an increasing interest, and provided benefits but also worries. In the follow-

ing, an overview of the most common drawbacks and benefits is given.

Drawbacks

RFID affects applications, infrastructure, business processes and personnel. It is a

part of IT. It is not simply another application [18], not a single, simple piece of tech-

nology, but it requires millions of tags containing standardized and coded data, and

thousands of tags readers. The tags transmit relevant data to multiple software appli-

cations, including middleware, databases, legacy systems and new applications [15].

Malwares may also be transmitted and safe programming practices and techniques are

needed for fighting database and web based attacks [14, 16]. Reading the properties

of an RFID tag without authorization could violate users’ privacy. Therefore, the use

of antennas with high reception capability should be limited and/or blocker tags [12],

or expensive techniques of cryptography within tags, or tags with short range of ac-

tion for reducing their interception should be used. Implementing an RFID system is

complex and expensive, as it required the acquisition of new components. Then, its

adoption must be also motivated and a concrete business purpose and a market need

are necessary for justifying its use.

Benefits

The RFID technology increases the ability of an organization of acquiring and storing

in a database a vast array of data regarding the location and properties of any entities

physically tagged and wirelessly scanned. It allows the tagged entities to become

mobile, intelligent, communicating component of the organization’s information

infrastructure [10]. It realize the linkage between the physical world and the Informa-

tion Technology (IT) and enables organizations to automatically monitor, decide, and

take actions [2].

The Wal-Mart Stores were among the first practitioners to engage a real RFID ex-

perience. Their RFID system, implemented in January 2005, was applied to supply

chain management. Afterward, many other enterprises (e.g., HP, Sun, IBM, Win-

dows, Intel, …) applied RFID in supply chain management. By using the RFID tech-

nology, the Wal-Mart Stores obtained an interesting Return On Investment (ROI) in

terms of a decrease of the number of rejects of perishable goods and employees for

checking them. Wall-Mart is continuing to consider RFID initiatives and encourage

suppliers and partners to use this technology [17]. Ford Motor Co. uses the RFID for

improving the efficiency of its supply chain. Ford had also an important impact on

safety and security, as well as on product sales and inventory management [11].

Medical organizations are particularly interested in the impact of RFID usage for

safety reasons [4]. They use RFID for tracking medical instruments, patients and

hospital personnel. An hospital in Taiwan used RFID technology for a medical appli-

cation [18], highlighting that RFID is a part of the IT infrastructure and its value is

delivered only through its business applications.

The idea of a possible impact of the RFID technology on security, allowed NEC

Corp. to obtain a contract with a Japanese bank for an RFID-based document man-

agement system in 2004. Bank of Nagoya Ltd. introduced the system in April 2005.

Antennas attached to bookshelves and filing cabinets were used. They communicated

data from RFID tags embedded in documents to a software system offered real-time

document tracking. Moreover, it could be combined with the employees’ identifica-

tion systems. Bank of Nagoya is having evidence of RFID solution benefits in terms

of cost reduction coming from the reduction of personnel [13].

3 The Business Case

The design of the business case regarded the following actors: the personnel of the

selected organization working with sensitive documents, process analysts and experts

in Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) technologies and methodologies. The coopera-

tion among these actors allowed the determination of:

- short-term requirements, oriented to improve the staff’s performances;

- long-term expectations, coming from the RFID use.

Short-Term Requirements

The personnel working with sensitive documents evidenced some inefficiencies of

the current document management system, common to other organizations. Some of

them could be overcome by the existent automated document management systems

and use of electronic mails. Unfortunately, this is not enough, as:

- the accounting office is legally obliged to keep payment receipts, faxes, invoices

and other documents some years. So, valuable staff time is spent for identifying

them and eliminating them when the office is not obliged to keep them;

- staff’s private information (e.g., curriculum, contracts) is stored in folders. They are

often kept on shelves and guarantees for their secure access is required;

- legal offices often move their dossiers outside the organization and can lose them. In

addition, a mechanism for rapidly finding them is needed;

- some administrative procedures have to follow a given bureaucratic course. Some

written and signed orders have to cross various bureaus and managers, and a user

could need to know the state of the procedures before taking his/her decisions.

The adoption of a document management system integrating RFID, could help to

overcome these limitations, with the following requirements: reduction of labor time;

increase of guarantees for security access; increase of capability of quickly locating

documents; increase of project managers awareness and users’ satisfaction. The same

benefits cannot be obtained by adopting other technology like bar code, documents

digitalization or documental workflow. Bar code technology allows to identify docu-

ments but not to trace their movements. The identification of a document is achieved

by passing it on a scanner for reading its bar code and it cannot be remotely per-

formed. Likewise, a digitalized document may be remotely consulted only if the

document is indexed and an information retrieval system is used, but information are

not provided regarding its physical location. The digitalization technology cannot

provide information for monitoring a business process or obtaining quality measures

from its execution. Analogously, the adoption of documental workflow can help to

monitor a business process, but such system is static and is designed without pro-

activeness. It is not able to autonomously capture illegal state changes in the work-

flow execution.

Then, in the business case, the application of RFID passive tags on documents was

considered Antennas placed in strategic points generate the magnetic field activating

RFID tags. When a tag is activated, it sends information to or receives information

from a reader. Passive tags have memory on board and are univocally identifiable by

means of a factory defined Unique Identifier (UID). In particular, the RFID available

memory was used for storing the name of the organization managing the document,

email address and phone number of the office responsible for attaching the RFID tag

on the document. In this way, whoever, outside or inside the organization, finds a lost

tagged document, could contact its responsible accessing an RFID antenna for read-

ing the information written on the tag.

Long-terms RFID Expectations

A document can be linked to a variety of additional informative parameters such as:

document description; office to which the document is destined; office responsible for

its storage; beneficiary of the procedure; production date; expiration date; priority;

access authorization; tags’ UIDs referencing other documents; etc. This information

can be kept into a database and those related to a document can be identified by

means of the UID of its tag. The wealth of the database represent a key element of the

success of RFID technology in the document management area. The database could

allow obtaining the workflow history of the tagged documents. The information kept

in the database could be linked to business intelligence tools, and/or UbiComp system

for improving enterprise performances.

For starting

to fill an

authorized

request

Researcher

resource

request

For starting

a procedure to

proclaim a

purchase

competition

Purchase

competition

request

[else]

For

completing

purchase

competition

Supply order

[resource

cost > fixed

threshold]

[available

resource]

[else]

Cash slip

Storing

For

knowing who

uses the

resource

For

inventorying

the resource

[the purchase

is feasible]

[else]

For starting

a procedure

of purchase

For finishing

to fill an

authorized

request

Signed supply

order

For starting

a procedure

of purchase

Purchase order

Loan for use

request

For starting

a request of

loan for use

Signed pur chase

order

Signed purchase

order

Signed pur chase

order

For executing

a procedure

of supply

Signed

packing

slip

For starting

a procedure

of testing

Signed

notification

of testing

[else]

[test

]

For starting

a procedure

of payment

Signed order to pay

Researcher

Director

Administration

Administrative

Secretary

Accounting

Office

Store

Legal

Office

Suppliers

Storing

Invoice

Storing

For starting

a procedure

of invoicing

Storing

Signed resource

request

Signed resource

request

For starting a

procedure to

refund bore

expenses

Storing

User Supervisor Executors

Inside Actors

Outside Actors

Signed

delivery order

Storing

Purchase

note

Storing

Fig. 1. Document diagram for the resource supply process.

4 The Pilot Experience

On the basis of interviews to the analyzed organization’s personal and the exam of

the existent Quality Manual conformed to the UNI EN ISO 9001:2000 standard the

pilot process was chosen. The process regarded the resource supply and, in particular,

Document

Alternative

Document

destination

Note

Linkage to

note

Start label

Stop label

Ball

the filling of the orders for purchasing the resources needed for the organization ac-

tivities. The documents produced during the selected business process are represented

in the document diagram shown in Fig. 1. The following subsections provide a

greater detail of the selected process, the designed RFID solution and the environ-

ment supporting it.

The Document Diagram

The document diagram in Fig. 1 highlights which documents open and close the

business process through an attached symbol start and stop, represented by ● and ●,

respectively. A ball in the diagram shown in Fig. 1 explains the function of the docu-

ment in input and defines the starting of the activity flow characterizing a given pro-

cedure inside a given business process. The documents shown between two balls are

the documents produced during the given procedure. The diagram in Fig. 1 does not

explicitly show the complete activity flow of a procedure but focuses on the circula-

tion of business entities and, specifically, the circulation of paper documents. It high-

lights how a document is related to other documents and when each document is

moved between the offices of an organization.

The vertical lane to whom or which office a given document is assigned. In addi-

tion, the lanes allows highlighting that the office producing a document is not always

responsible for its storage. Finally, the Suppliers lane is related to business process’s

procedures that are outside an organization as documents produced by suppliers, such

as packing slip and invoices, are related to the start of internal procedures.

The Resource Supply Process

The pilot business process involves three main actors: researchers; Director (supervi-

sor of the processes) and staff of the administration offices (executors of the proce-

dures characterizing the selected business process). Four mutually exclusive paths

characterize the process of filling a resource purchase order:

a) the resource is available (see Fig. 1, path 1 2 3 4 5a …) and the staff’s Store can

deliver immediately the required resource to the researcher;

b) the resource is not available and has a value lower then a fixed threshold (see Fig.

1, path 1 2 3 4 5b 6a …) and the Store staff starts a procedure for purchasing and

delivering the requested resource;

c) the resource is not available and has a value higher than a fixed threshold, its pur-

chase is feasible (see Fig. 1, path 1 2 3 4 5b 6b 7 8b …) and a request for starting a

procedure to proclaim a purchase competition to legal office is sent. The procedure

is activated from a supply order (see Fig. 1, path 1 2 3 4 5b 6b 7 8b 9 10) and not

simply from the purchase note (see Fig. 1, path 1 2 3);

d) the resource is not available and has a value higher then a fixed threshold, its pur-

chase is not feasible (see Fig. 1, path 1 2 3 4 5b 6b 7 8a…) and a label of stop is ap-

plied on the signed resource request.

In short, the resource supply process finishes when the researcher resource request

is rejected or when it is delivered. In particular, if the resource purchase has followed

the c) path the resource supply process finishes when the filled invoice is also stored

from the administration office.

The Designed Solution

The activities of each procedure in Fig.1 can start only when a given document is

produced from an office and/or signed from a person in charge. Thus, a sequential

order exists among these documents and a finite number of their chains is clearly

identifiable. In particular, four potential chains of documents are present because four

mutually exclusive paths exist for satisfying the researcher resource request.

A waste of time can happen in the procedure execution when, for instance, a

document remains in an incorrect or long stack of other documents. The produced

delay can be a unforeseen delay and result harmless, force the re-planning of the

organization activities and be source of economic damages. If a team leader has

planned research activities for when the required resources are delivered and the

resources do not arrive on time as the purchase order (see Fig. 1, path 1 2 3 4 5b 6b 7

8b 9 10 11 12 13…) is lost, forgotten or delayed in the chain of signa-

tures/authorizations: a) the team leader could be obliged to pay the researchers with-

out they work because the required resources are not available and/or (b) could even

lose the reserved funds because the purchase procedure has not been completed

within the time limit.

RFID technology introduces a major control on documents by analyzing the chains

of documents.

Purchase

competition request

[resource cost > fixed

threshold]

Cash slip

Packing slip

Notification

of testing

Order to pay

Researcher

Director

Administration

Administrative

Secretary

Accounting

Office

Store

Legal Office

Supplier

Invo ice

Loan for use

request

[not feasible

purchase]

[resource cost <

fixed threshold]

[available

resource]

Resource request

Supply order

Purchase order

Delivery order

Purchase note

Fig. 2. Chains of potential tagged paper documents.

Fig. 2 shows the abstract of the document diagram shown in Fig. 1, depicted in

terms of document chains. In particular, a different oriented temporal line, labeled

with one or more of the following symbol, connects the documents of each chain: a

signature mark “*” shows who signs a document; a storage mark “X” represents

where a document is stored; a creation mark “<<” indicates where a document is

produced.

By automating the monitoring and management of the document chains, it is pos-

sible to obtain information regarding a document, such as who possesses it, if it is

outside fixed boundaries, moved along a non-correct or unauthorized path or an inter-

ruption or delay happen along the path. By means of this information who manages,

carries out and uses a business process can improve its knowledge regarding the ac-

tivity flows that circulate within the organization and gain the advantages cited above.

In conclusion, an engine supporting the short-term requirements and addressing

long-terms expectations from RFID use has been designed for:

a) communicating with the readers of the antennas attached to the desks and in some

strategic points for knowing if within a business process for each tagged document

exists another tagged document referring it. When this condition is violated, the ac-

tivities of the business process could be interrupted, an alert event can be launched

and a timer activated. When a fixed interval of time is spent and the engine does not

find a tagged document referring the tagged document in examination, an alarm can

be launched to the office to which the last one is destined. In this way, the personal

of this office can be pressed for resolving the cause of procedure interruption;

b) controlling that all the used RFID tags are within the reading range of an available

antenna. When an RFID tag is registered but it is not within the range of any anten-

nas, an alert event can be launched and a timer activated. If the condition is again

violated after a fixed interval of time and the related business process is open, an

alarm can be launched to the receiver of the examined tagged document, or to the

office responsible for its storage, if the related business process is closed. In this

way the accidental lost of documents can be avoided;

c) being on the alert that used RFID tags are not illegally destroyed. In this case, the

designed engine can just send an alarm when it is not anymore able to monitor the

related tagged document. Currently, there is still no strong guaranty that a RFID tag

attached to document papers is not illegally removed from the document itself.

Some work are done in the direction of being able to embed RFID tag directly in-

side the paper, like reducing the RFID tag size [7]

d) controlling if there are tagged documents with an urgent priority. When this condi-

tion is verified, a message is sent to the receiver of the tagged document, so that the

procedure managing the document is more quickly executed;

e) communicating with the readers of the antennas attached to bookshelves and draw-

ers for knowing if they store tagged documents that are expired and can be elimi-

nated. Each time this condition is verified, message can be sent to the responsible

for managing and inventorying the document, till when the tag is removed from the

expired document and all the documents that it refers, and an expiration label is

written in the database with reference to the UID of each disarmed tag;

f) communicating with the readers of the antennas attached near the entry/exit to/from

the considered organization and its offices for knowing if tagged documents are

brought outside them or authorized boundaries. Each time that the designed engine

verifies this condition, an alarm sending a vocal message can be launched, the lu-

minosity of the area of entry/exit is lighted and a camera near the alarm point is

turned on for filming who moves the document in an unauthorized area. This func-

tionality can be realized only if a mechanism of topographical localization has been

designed. Topographical localization provides logistic information with reference

to fixed geographical coordinates.

The Adopted UbiComp Platform

For addressing the short-term requirements and the long-terms expectations discussed

above, the engine to be implemented will be integrated as a service, named RFID

Document Management (RDM) service, into an already existing extensible and ubiq-

uitous platform [8, 9]. The services provided from this platform (a) has been con-

cretely implemented; (b) are accessible from multiple types of user interfaces (e.g.

Java/Java Web Start Application, Web browser, Jini browser); and (c) are used within

a simulated real environment.

This platform was written in Java and designed as a general UbiComp common

execution environment so that it is clearly reusable in different projects and for re-

designing business processes using RFID technology. In particular, three services

useful for the RDM service are included: INTELLICENCE, RFID and

LOCALIZATION. The INTELLIGENCE service allows the automatic creation of

rules by using a learning system developed on the top of the WEKA tool [6]. These

rules describe the relations between events and actions and are executed by the Jess

rule engine [5]. RFID service works with active or passive RFID tags and

LOCALIZATION service was implemented for locating people and objects.

5 The Deployment

The RFID technology can be introduced into the considered organization during

deployment phase. However, technological support is needed for integrating it into

business processes, as the technology is still not plug and play in existing applica-

tions.

The RDM service is designed for addressing this need and acting transversally to

existent enterprise solutions with the aim of avoiding the modification of existing

applications or architecture. In particular, the RDM service allows monitoring and

managing the activated chains of documents for each defined business process using

the required equipment for organization’s offices and documents. The UbiComp

experts defined the requirements: installation of the UbiComp environment on a PC

connected to a network and connection of the RDM service to the database; attach-

ment of passive RFID tags on the documents produced during the business process

depicted on the considered diagram; antennas and readers installation in each office

which is shown with a storage mark and in each entry/exit point to/from offices. Us-

ing the RFID service provided by the adopted UbiComp platform, the RDM service

has the potentiality of showing a real time view of the state of the activated chain of

RFID tagged documents for each business process allowing a lower level of errors,

improving planning capability and taking more careful decisions.

6 Conclusions

This paper presented an RFID investigation for supporting RFID document manage-

ment. It permitted to: (a) further confirm that formalizing business processes im-

proves their comprehension; (b) verify the real extensibility of an existing UbiComp

environment, and (c) obtain a further abstraction level of a business process with

reference to the document management. The abstraction at document level aims at

increasing the awareness on the state of a business process.

A clear understanding of individual business requirements and the presupposition

of a quantifiable ROI are necessary conditions for winning the main difficulty of

RFID technology and make convenient the implementation of a RFID system [1].

These conditions become also sufficient when RFID solution is justified from a busi-

ness case. In particular, this idea is widely shared from many experts. Deloitte devel-

oped the methodology RFID evaluator, oriented to evaluate the feasibility of imple-

menting a RFID project, in collaboration with Sun. While, IBM underlined that most

companies are adopting some hybrid of two approaches to the RFID use [2]:

- top down approach that starts with the project of a business case, and passes

through the preparation and execution of a pilot, since the deployment;

- learning by doing approach that starts with proofs or building of a simple trial,

passing through a pilot or business case for deciding if advancing with the deploy-

ment.

This paper presented a business case by following the first approach. The top

down RFID design in support of document management required the analysis of two

roles: process analysts and experts in UbiComp technologies and methodologies. The

process analysts had to depict the document diagrams for the selected business proc-

ess by interviewing the organization staff and consulting the existent Quality Manual.

The UbiComp experts have to obtain an abstract view of the depicted document dia-

grams and introduce an RDM service or customize an existing one. The integration of

an RDM service in an UbiComp environment was analyzed and the steps to be exe-

cuted during its deployment were defined by using the product abstract diagrams.

Future directions will regard improving the implementation aspects of the de-

signed RDM service. In addition, its experimentation in various real contexts will be

executed for obtaining an evaluation of its performances and the ROI improvement

with the introduction of RFID in an organization.

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