A Japanese platform that tracks rental pallets one at a time, using RFID tags or QR codes fixed to the pallet itself, passed 1,000 adopting companies in September 2026. In October 2026 it won a national design award for the way it does it, and a separate government citation from December 2025 puts hard numbers on what the tracking actually changed in one pharmaceutical supply chain.
The platform is TRAX GO, operated by Sanko Pallet Rental Co., Ltd. (SPR), a group company of Sanko Co., Ltd., Japan’s largest manufacturer of plastic logistics equipment such as pallets and crates. Sanko announced on 16 October 2026 that TRAX GO had won a 2026 Good Design Award, entered under the name “Logistics information traceability system TRAX GO”. SPR says, on the basis of its own research, that it is the first Good Design Award won by a company in the pallet rental industry.
What the award was for
The Good Design Award is Japan’s long-running national design programme, run by the Japan Institute of Design Promotion (JDP), a public interest foundation. JDP announced the 2026 results on 15 October 2026: 1,484 winning entries from 1,032 companies, out of 5,111 entries judged. The award covers industrial design, systems and services rather than appearance alone, which is why a logistics back-end platform is eligible at all.
The official award summary describes TRAX GO as an asset management platform for all shippers and logistics companies that fuses devices such as RFID with software, links logistics materials to the loads they carry, and delivers on-site management through a smartphone. The jury’s comment singled out two things: traceability that works across multiple companies rather than inside one, and a smartphone interface arrived at through repeated dialogue with users and on-site verification. The jury also rated the adoption record itself, more than 1,000 companies across a wide range of industries, as evidence that the tailor-made extension model works.
How the tracking works
TRAX GO combines RFID tags or QR codes attached to pallets with cloud software, so that the question of which pallet is carrying which goods, and where that pallet is, has an answer at any moment. Because the load is linked to the pallet record, the platform can be used to eliminate goods-inwards inspection and to replace paper delivery notes, and because each pallet is managed as an individual item rather than as a count, it supports loss prevention and planned recovery of empties.
The design points Sanko sets out are mostly about openness. One mechanism connects multiple companies, which is the fragmentation problem that defeats most single-firm asset systems. It can be configured per company, per user and per site. It integrates with ERP, WMS and TMS systems and with other firms’ dock booking systems. And it is sold as an open solution, available to shippers, warehouses, logistics operators and to Sanko’s own competitors. The underlying reframing, in the company’s words, is that a pallet is a medium that carries information. TRAX GO was first released in July 2019.
RFID or QR, and how much of each
This is worth stating plainly, because the sources do not. Neither Sanko, nor SPR, nor the award text discloses the RFID frequency or band in use, the tag supplier, how many tags sit on a pallet, what share of SPR’s rental fleet carries RFID tags rather than QR codes alone, or how many of the 1,000 adopting companies read tags rather than scan codes. The 1,000 figure is a platform adoption count, not an RFID deployment count, and should be read that way.
The pharmaceutical deployment, documented by government
The strongest evidence for the platform doing real work is not in the award text but in a Japanese government document. On 23 December 2025, Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) presented a Logistics DX and Standardisation Award in Tokyo under the FY2025 Green Logistics Partnership Conference, a long-standing MLIT-backed scheme that recognises joint projects between shippers and logistics firms that cut transport emissions. The citation, titled “Realising efficient pharmaceutical logistics and traceability through the introduction of rental pallets”, went jointly to SPR, Otsuka Warehouse Co., Ltd., a Japanese third-party logistics operator in the Otsuka group with a substantial pharmaceutical business, Sanko Co., Ltd., and ten pharmaceutical manufacturers.
MLIT’s description of the problem is blunt. In pharmaceuticals, each manufacturer running its own pallets is the norm, and that individual operation loads work onto the logistics front line and poses a real risk to keeping medicine moving. SPR and Otsuka Warehouse agreed to standardise on shared-use rental pallets, producing a single pallet-based process from the manufacturer’s plant through to the pharmaceutical wholesaler. Individual pallet-level management is done with the RFID and QR codes fitted to SPR’s pallets, and TRAX GO is used to share advance shipping information by linking each pallet to its load. The QR code carries the pallet’s individual number together with GS1-128, the barcode standard used across pharmaceutical and grocery supply chains to encode structured data such as batch numbers and expiry dates, and it is read with a smartphone.
The change MLIT measured is a routing change. Empty pallets from Otsuka Warehouse’s sales warehouse in Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture previously went on a 642 km repositioning run to a washing site in Aizumi, Itano District, Tokushima Prefecture. Under the new arrangement the washing site became a pallet depot, and empties instead return to the nearest SPR depot in Ota, Gunma Prefecture, 18 km away. For that modelled case MLIT states a reduction of 116.9 tonnes of CO2 per year, a 97% cut, along with 156,000 km of repositioning distance and 1,750 hours of operating time removed.
MLIT adds a footnote that needs handling carefully: applied to Otsuka Warehouse’s annual shipment volume of 1.5 million pallets, the reduction would come to 17,909 tonnes of CO2 a year. That is explicitly MLIT’s own extrapolation from the modelled case, not an achieved company-wide result, and the 116.9 tonne figure is the one tied to the documented change. MLIT also lists non-carbon effects: less burden on people working in pharmaceutical logistics, the removal of ultra-long-distance empty running, digital efficiency along the chain, and end-of-life pallets going back into raw material rather than to scrap.
Why pallet-level tracking is a Japanese priority
The pallets in question are Japan’s standard 1,100 mm square rental type, commonly called the 11-type, which MLIT’s standard specification sets at 1,100 mm by 1,100 mm with a one tonne maximum load. Pallet standardisation is the backbone of MLIT’s logistics efficiency work, and shared pooling only functions if the pool can be counted, found and recovered, which is precisely the job an identifier on each pallet does. Separately, SPR’s own news page lists a November 2025 item, reported in Shokuhin Shimbun, on RFID-fitted rental pallets supplied to the Japanese snack maker Koikeya, which suggests the pharmaceutical work is not the only sector where the tagged pallets are in use.
More on tagged returnable transport items in our logistics coverage and asset tracking coverage.
Sanko gives Kenichiro Kanagawa as the press contact for the announcement, at [email protected] or +81 3 4212 3535.
Read more at https://www.g-mark.org/gallery/winners/38286
