AED Group, a Belgian audiovisual equipment rental company founded in 1985, is tagging its aluminium truss stock with custom-built RAIN RFID hard tags from Beontag, and plans to have every truss in its inventory tagged by 2026. The project, described in a case study Beontag published in August 2025, produced a curved version of the Ironside Slim tag that fits tube diameters from 16mm up to 48mm and is bonded on with industrial adhesive rather than drilled or bracketed into place.
AED Group rents, leases, sells and services professional lighting, sound and video equipment for entertainment and corporate events, and runs warehouses in several countries. Beontag manufactures self-adhesive materials and RFID inlays, labels and hard tags; its Ironside range is a family of rugged on-metal UHF tags built for industrial asset tracking, where the metal an ordinary tag is stuck to would otherwise detune its antenna and kill the read.
Why truss defeats an ordinary tag
Truss is the aluminium lattice tubing that holds lighting, speakers and screens above a stage or an exhibition stand. It is close to a worst case for tagging. The surface is metal, it is round and asymmetrical rather than flat, and the tubing is load-bearing rigging, so AED could not drill holes or otherwise modify it to accept a conventional tag mount. On top of that, truss comes back from events dirty and goes through high-pressure washing, which had defeated earlier adhesive attempts.
The operational cost of not tagging it was the familiar one for a high-volume rental business. Kit went missing after events or came back to the wrong place, and check-in and check-out depended on manual barcode scanning and visual counts, which are slow, labour-intensive and easy to get wrong at scale.
A curved tag, glued rather than drilled
Beontag worked with AED’s in-house RFID team, its ICT leadership and its project managers to rework the existing Ironside Slim Curved tag. The first version was optimised for 16mm truss tubing and was later adapted to cover diameters up to 48mm. The engineering was deliberately modular, so the same tooling can be reused for other round-surface assets rather than being a one-off for this customer.
Two details in the design are worth noting because they are the sort of thing that decides whether a rollout sticks. The tags were produced in black and light grey so they disappear against AED’s kit and stay discreet during shows and in transport, and they mount with a strong industrial adhesive, which removes the need to touch the structural integrity of the truss at all.
Gates at the warehouse door
On the reading side, AED put high-performance RFID gates at warehouse entry points, so tagged assets are detected automatically as they pass through rather than being scanned item by item. A gate, or portal, is a fixed reader with antennas either side of a doorway that interrogates every tag carried through it, which is what turns a truck load of returning truss into an inventory event with no operator effort.
What AED reports so far
Beontag’s case study records faster check-in and check-out and quicker warehouse turnaround, real-time visibility of equipment movements across AED’s global warehouse locations, and fewer staff hours spent on equipment validation and maintenance processing. It does not publish percentages or timings for any of those, so the gains are stated as direction rather than as figures. The one hard durability claim is that the redesigned tags survived the high-pressure washing cycles and rough handling that had damaged previous attempts.
The rollout itself is staged. A pilot ran in 2024, and the project has since been moving to full implementation with the whole truss fleet due to be tagged by 2026. Beontag has a comparable Ironside deployment with Rent-All, another AV rental company, which suggests truss and staging tagging is becoming a recognised pattern in the sector rather than a one-off experiment.
What the tag is, technically
Beontag’s published specification for the Ironside Slim Curved puts it in the global UHF band at 865 to 928 MHz, compliant with ISO 18000-63 (EPCglobal Gen2v2), which is the RAIN RFID air interface standard. It carries an NXP UCODE 9xm chip with 496 bits of EPC memory and 752 bits of user memory, measures 82 x 16 x 10.5 mm, and is housed in an IP68 enclosure sealed by ultrasonic welding, making it submersible and dustproof. Beontag quotes a read range of up to 16 metres on metallic surfaces. That combination of a sealed housing and a long on-metal range is what makes a drive-through gate read realistic for washed, knocked-about rental stock.
More deployments of this kind are collected in our asset tracking coverage.
Read more at https://www.beontag.com/cases/enhancing-av-equipment-management-rfid-beontag-aed-group/
