KSK, a pharmaceutical wholesaler based in Osaka, is to start taking proof of delivery on prescription medicines by tapping an NFC card, rather than collecting a signature on a paper slip. The company and Hitachi announced on 22 October 2026 that a proof of concept covering the NFC receipts and a dynamic delivery-routing function had finished at the end of September, and that both would go into day to day use at KSK branches in sequence from November 2026.
KSK distributes prescription medicines to hospitals and pharmacies across the Kinki region of western Japan, running 32 sales bases and three logistics centres there. It is one of the main operating companies of Vital KSK Holdings, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime market. Hitachi, its technology partner here, is the Japanese industrial and IT group, with revenue of 10,586.7 billion yen in the year to March 2026.
How the NFC receipt works
The driver reads the customer’s NFC card with a smartphone at the point of handover. The app matches the card against recipient information registered in advance, then captures the date and time of receipt and the audit trail automatically as data. Hitachi says the aim is to prevent impersonation and mis-receipt, meaning goods accepted by someone other than the registered recipient, and to end the paper slip work branches had to collect, reconcile and store.
NFC is the short-range strand of HF RFID, running at 13.56 MHz and built into nearly every smartphone sold, which lets a driver’s own handset act as the reader with no extra kit on the round. Hitachi’s release defines the term only as wireless communication over a short distance.
That is where the technical detail stops, and the gaps matter to anyone costing a similar scheme. Neither company says what card or chip type the customers hold, how many customers have been issued one, which app the drivers run, or whether the cards also cover controlled drugs, where Japanese receipt rules are stricter. Neither release carries an executive quote, and neither was published in English.
The bigger number is not RFID
The headline result of the trial belongs to the routing software rather than the cards. Hitachi Digital Solution for Logistics, or HDSL, is a delivery planning and execution product in Hitachi’s HMAX Industry range, and the trial tested its Point Dynamic function. Drivers normally keep to the fixed rounds they know well. When the system detects that one is absent, an optimisation engine works out whether the missing round’s drops can be absorbed elsewhere, weighing how close destinations are to each other, delivery time windows, whether vehicles are permitted onto a given site, load volume and each remaining route’s spare capacity, then reassigns them automatically.
Until now KSK’s sales staff drove those deliveries themselves, with a manager or an experienced dispatcher rearranging rounds by hand. Hitachi puts the cut in that substitute-delivery workload at 60%, calculated from the operating data of delivery staff at the trial branches. No baseline hours and no sample size are published, so the figure cannot be checked from outside, and this part is scheduling optimisation, not identification technology.
The two companies have been at this since September 2025, when they announced a joint project to digitise KSK’s delivery work, starting at the Osaka branch. That phase linked HDSL to HITLUSTER, Hitachi’s integrated logistics management system, so that consolidation checks at despatch and goods receipt at the customer were captured as data, with receipt taken by card touch or electronic signature. Before it, goods were sorted by hand and signed for on paper.
For anyone specifying readers and credentials, the useful part is the plainer one: a contactless card doing the job a signature used to do, on a medicine round, now out of trial and into commercial operation. Japan has a run of similar logistics projects under way, among them the TRAX GO pallet-tracking platform, which passed 1,000 companies in October 2026.
Read more at https://www.hitachi.com/content/dam/hitachi/global/ja_jp/press/files/2026/10/1022a.pdf
