Aerospace and defence supply chain group Incora says it has cut the time staff spend locating missing stock by more than 95% at a US distribution centre, after replacing manual searches with a RAIN RFID system built on Zebra Technologies hardware and Xemelgo cloud software.
The deployment began at Incora’s Jonestown site and went from installation to live operation in three months, according to a success story published by Zebra. The numbers are the customer’s own and have not been independently audited, which is worth holding in mind, but the hardware list and the workflow behind the headline figure are specific enough to be useful.
Why a parts distributor needs item level visibility
Incora was formed in 2020, when Platinum Equity acquired Wesco Aircraft and combined it with Pattonair, the merged business taking the Incora name that March. It filed for Chapter 11 protection in June 2023 and emerged on 31 January 2025 following a court approved reorganisation. The company is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas and runs 68 locations. Zebra’s write up puts those across 19 countries, while Incora’s own emergence announcement said 17, so treat the exact count loosely.
The catalogue is not in dispute. Incora handles more than 570,000 SKUs, largely fasteners, specialised hardware and chemical products for aviation and defence customers. That is a difficult inventory to run on barcode scanning alone. Chemicals carry shelf life, aerospace parts carry traceability obligations, and a box nobody can find is functionally the same as a box that does not exist, which is how write offs and expedited shipping fees accumulate. Incora also told Zebra that customer inventory enquiries were taking roughly two days to answer.
What was installed
- Zebra FX9600 fixed RAIN RFID readers, ceiling and racking mounted
- Zebra ATR7000 overhead real-time locating system (RTLS) readers
- Zebra MC3300 RFID series mobile computers for handheld searching
- Zebra ZT400 series industrial printers, ZQ600 Plus series mobile printers and ZD600 series desktop printers for on-site label encoding
- Xemelgo cloud RFID software, feeding read data into Incora’s ERP
Standard labels were replaced with RFID labels printed and encoded on site, so tagging happens inside existing goods-in and put-away work rather than as a separate exercise.
Presence detection is not locationing
This is the part of the deployment that actually explains the 95% claim. Both reader families are UHF RAIN RFID, running EPC Gen2v2 over the ISO 18000-63 air interface at 902 to 928 MHz in North America, but they do different jobs.
The FX9600 is a conventional fixed reader, available with four or eight monostatic antenna ports in a die cast aluminium IP53 housing rated from minus 20 to plus 55 degrees C. Point its antennas at a dock door or a rack face and it tells you a tag is present in that read zone. That is presence detection, and for portals and rack level inventory it is the right tool. What it cannot tell you is where, across a large open floor area, a tag has actually ended up.
The ATR7000 can. It is an overhead reader with a steerable phased array antenna that electronically sweeps a beam across the floor below it, inferring the bearing to each tag from the beam directions that produce a response and resolving that into a position. Zebra quotes locationing accuracy of around 0.6 m at R50 and 1.2 m at R95 when the reader is paired with its locationing analytics software. In practical terms that is the difference between “the item is somewhere in this building” and “the item is in this aisle, in this bay”, which is what turns a multi-hour physical search into a short walk. The MC3300 handhelds then close the final couple of metres, using received signal strength to home in on the individual tag.
The claimed results
Alongside the 95% plus reduction in time spent verifying inventory locations, Incora reports customer inventory enquiries handled more than 75% faster (a few hours rather than two days), inventory exceptions resolved in under 30 minutes instead of a multi-hour manual process, a significant drop in distribution centre write offs, and an expectation of fewer expedited delivery fees.
Bradley Frank, Senior Distribution Center Manager, said “Time spent verifying the location of inventory has been reduced by more than 95%”. Brandon Journay, Sr. Manager, Global Business Improvement, described the chemical inventory workflow: “Today, we can log in, identify the item, and have it ready for dispatch within around 30 minutes”.
The software side
Xemelgo, the software partner, is based in Bellevue, Washington and sells cloud RFID applications covering work orders, calibrated tools, vendor managed inventory and shipment tracking, with more than 100 factory deployments to its name and customers including Yamaha and SEKISUI Aerospace. Zebra Ventures, the vendor’s corporate venture arm, made a strategic investment in Xemelgo in July 2025, so the relationship between the two companies is rather closer than a routine integration partnership.
Jonestown was the first site. The more interesting question for the rest of the sector is whether a three month rollout repeats across a 68 location network, because that, rather than any single site percentage, is where the business case for RAIN RFID in aerospace distribution is won or lost.
