There are three primary areas of AVI that incur initial and follow up costs. They include the readers, the tags and the service / maintenance. This three part series will look at each aspect of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and illustrate how to calculate TCO. In our first part, we evaluate the readers themselves.
When paying for an entirely new install, the customer is
inclined to look at the bottom dollar price and will fail to include the additional
costs that come from operating a technical AVI system. Readers, while often not the largest single
line item (tags are because of their quantity), they do have the largest initial
single item cost.
One thing that will increase the TCO is the lifecycle length
of the reader. If your reader does not
include backward compatibility and a long lifecycle, then your total cost over
the lifetime of the project can increase dramatically. Replacing a single discontinued reader may involve a total system replacement.
A second issue is the reader’s compatibility with
