Recurring revenue is now 42 per cent of the nine month total

The structural story sits underneath the headline. Recurring revenue reached EUR 32.4 million in the third quarter of 2026, up 17 per cent from EUR 27.8 million a year earlier, and EUR 95.7 million across the first nine months of 2026 against EUR 82.0 million in the same period of 2025, also 17 per cent higher. That makes recurring revenue 42 per cent of total revenue for the nine month period, and it is growing faster than the top line in every one of the four key markets.

“The third quarter reflects continued customer demand for our solutions, with recurring revenue again growing faster than total revenue,” said chief executive Rob Schuurman. “As this base grows, it provides an increasingly strong foundation for sustainable long-term growth and value creation.”

For anyone buying RFID, that percentage is the accounting trace of a change in how these systems are sold. An item level programme used to land as a capital purchase of fixed and handheld readers, tags and a perpetual licence. Increasingly it lands as a subscription, with the software platform, the analytics and often the hardware wrapped into a per store or per site fee, which smooths the supplier’s revenue and moves the buyer’s spend from capex to opex.

Retail adds first time RFID users and takes customers from rivals

Retail revenue increased in the third quarter of 2026 compared with the third quarter of 2025, and the mix of new logos is the detail worth noting: Nedap said it added both retailers adopting RFID for the first time and retailers replacing an existing provider. Nedap’s retail business is built on passive UHF RFID, also marketed as RAIN RFID, which operates in the 860 to 960 MHz band and delivers the read range and bulk read rate needed to count a sales floor and a stockroom in minutes rather than days. A market in which both greenfield adopters and competitive displacements are signing in the same quarter is one where the technology case is settled and the contest has moved on to the software layer.

Use of those deployments is also widening. Nedap said adoption continued to expand beyond inventory counting into automated replenishment, on-shelf availability and overhead inventory visibility, which is the shift from counting stock to acting on the count. Cycle counting answers how many units a store holds. Replenishment, shelf availability and overhead stock visibility answer which units are in the wrong place, and that is where accurate item level data starts paying for itself in sales rather than in stock loss alone.

Nedap’s RFID-enabled self-checkout portfolio also saw its first large-scale deployments in the third quarter of 2026. Reading a basket by RFID instead of scanning each barcode removes the slowest step at the till, although it only works where the whole assortment is reliably tagged, which is why apparel has reached it first.

The largest named retail commitment is with VF Corporation, the US apparel group behind brands including The North Face, Vans and Timberland. The previously announced partnership is the reference point for what Nedap calls its Inventory Engine vision, the idea of a single inventory record that is accurate across stores and the wider supply chain rather than one that stops at the shop door. The planned rollout covers more than 1,500 stores across VF’s brand portfolio and extends to distribution centres and vendor partners to support end to end visibility. Tagging at source and reading at every handover is what lets a retailer treat one stock figure as true from factory to fitting room.

Livestock falls back on timing while healthcare grows

Livestock revenue declined in the third quarter of 2026 against a strong third quarter of 2025, which Nedap attributed mainly to the timing of deliveries and a further shift towards subscription-based offerings. Recurring revenue in that market still rose as adoption of as-a-service offerings grew, and the installed base expanded across multiple regions. Labour scarcity, increasing farm scale and the pressure for efficiency remain the long-term drivers for cow monitoring and automation, which in dairy typically means an ear tag or neck transponder identifying each animal at the feeder, the sorting gate and the parlour.

Healthcare revenue increased in the third quarter of 2026, with Nedap reporting a stronger position in disability care and elderly care and more care organisations adopting its treatment records as professionals and practitioners work within the same record.

Security holds steady as Nedap Pace goes live at Bayer

Security revenue remained broadly stable in the third quarter of 2026. Nedap Pace, the company’s platform for managing physical access across multiple sites, countries and existing access control systems, went live at the first building on the Bayer CropScience Campus in Monheim, part of the crop science division of the German life sciences group Bayer, under Bayer’s AllAccess programme to set a common standard for physical access management. Nedap also introduced Nedap Way, a new reader line for secure building access that supports both card-based and mobile credentials and works with a range of new and existing access control systems, so sites can modernise in stages rather than in one cutover.

Outlook

Nedap expects revenue growth in the second half of 2026 compared with the second half of 2025. Geopolitical instability in the Middle East continues to delay customer rollouts for its security solutions in that region. The company said it will keep investing with particular emphasis on its technology platform, AI and cybersecurity. More retail RFID coverage and further company and financial results are collected on RFID News.

Read more at https://www.nedap.com/en/news/trading-update-q3-2026

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Walmart’s first serious push into RFID is one of the most studied episodes in the history of supply chain technology. In 2003, the world’s largest retailer announced that its top 100 suppliers would be required to apply UHF RFID tags to pallets and cases by January 2005. The ambition was transformative. The execution was a lesson in what happens when a technology mandate moves ahead of the ecosystem’s ability to support it.

What Walmart Was Trying to Achieve

The logic behind the mandate was sound. Walmart’s supply chain was processing enormous volumes of product through hundreds of distribution centres and thousands of stores. Inventory accuracy problems, receiving discrepancies, and out-of-stock rates on the sales floor were costing money and losing sales. RFID at the pallet and case level, read at DC receiving and store delivery, promised to give Walmart visibility it simply could not get from barcode scanning.

The vision extended further. If suppliers tagged everything and Walmart’s infrastructure could read those tags continuously through the supply chain, the company would have near-real-time visibility of inventory in transit, in the DC, and on its way to the sales floor. The operational benefits would be significant and the competitive advantage potentially decisive.

Walmart also had the scale to move an industry. If you sold to Walmart, you complied. The mandate would force RFID adoption across the supplier base whether those suppliers were ready or not, and in doing so would accelerate the development of the RFID ecosystem broadly.

What Went Wrong

The mandate ran into several problems simultaneously, and they compounded each other.

The technology was not ready at the required cost and performance level. In 2003 and 2004, UHF RFID tags cost significantly more per unit than they do today, and read rates in real warehouse environments were lower and less consistent than laboratory conditions suggested. The EPC Gen2 standard, which brought the interoperability and performance improvements that underpinned later successful deployments, was not finalised until late 2004. Suppliers were being asked to invest in equipment and processes built around earlier, less capable standards.

Compliance became performative. Suppliers who could not see a return on investment in RFID for their own operations had no incentive to integrate it meaningfully into their processes. Many applied tags at the end of the line, after picking and packing, in what became known as “slap and ship” compliance. Tags were applied to cases just before they left the dock, with no connection to the supplier’s own inventory or warehouse management systems. The tag was present, which satisfied the mandate. The data it carried was often incomplete or unreliable, which defeated the purpose.

Walmart’s own infrastructure was not fully prepared to exploit the data even where it was good. Reader deployments in DCs and stores were uneven. The middleware and data management systems needed to process millions of tag reads per day and turn them into actionable inventory insights were still being developed. In some cases, RFID data was being collected but not acted upon, creating a disconnect between the investment being asked of suppliers and the value being extracted by Walmart.

The business case for suppliers was genuinely weak. Unlike item-level RFID in apparel, where the tag travels with the product to the consumer and provides inventory management benefits to the retailer throughout the product’s life, pallet and case-level tags in a general merchandise supply chain were read at a handful of points and then discarded. The supplier bore the cost of tagging. The retailer captured most of the benefit. Without a clear ROI for suppliers, compliance was grudging rather than genuine.

What the Numbers Showed

Academic research conducted around the mandate period, including a widely cited study from the University of Arkansas, found that RFID-tagged products experienced out-of-stock rates approximately 16 percent lower than untagged equivalent products in Walmart stores. The technology was producing measurable results where it was working correctly. But the proportion of supplier shipments where it was working correctly was lower than the mandate implied, and the cost of achieving even partial compliance was substantial across the supply base.

Walmart quietly scaled back its public RFID ambitions in the years following the initial mandate. The deadlines were extended, the compliance requirements evolved, and the focus shifted toward categories and use cases where the value proposition was clearer. The world-changing supply chain transformation announced in 2003 did not materialise on the promised timeline.

What the Industry Learned

Walmart’s RFID mandate did not fail because RFID does not work. It ran ahead of what the technology, the standards, and the ecosystem could reliably deliver at the time, and it imposed costs on a supply base that could not see a return on those costs in their own operations.

The lessons are applicable to any large-scale technology mandate. A compliance requirement without a viable business case for the party being required to comply produces performative compliance rather than genuine adoption. Technology standards matter: deploying before the standard is stable means investing in something that may need to be replaced. And the infrastructure to exploit data has to be built before the data is demanded, not after.

Walmart’s later RFID work, focused on item-level tagging in apparel and specific product categories, has been considerably more successful. The approach changed: narrower scope, clearer value proposition, better technology, and a standards environment that had matured in the decade since the original mandate. The 2003 push pushed too far, too fast. But it did push the industry, and some of what followed — including the development of EPC Gen2 and the maturation of the RFID ecosystem — might have taken longer without the pressure it applied.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The problem was never detection, it was identification

SBB Infrastructure operates the train inspection facilities and monitors the infrastructure and every vehicle running on it permanently. SBB says more than 100 train monitoring systems are in use across the network, measuring trains as they move for faults such as overheated braking systems, defective axle box bearings and load displacement, with the readings checked around the clock at an intervention centre in Erstfeld. The aim is to spot a defective vehicle early and intervene before it becomes an incident.

What was missing was real-time transparency at the level of an individual vehicle. SBB could establish that a vehicle was defective but could not determine its exact vehicle number, so condition measurements could not be passed to the vehicle owners responsible for acting on them, and nobody could use component wear data before the problem reached a critical level. The old process did catch defective vehicles once an intervention threshold was reached, but those unplanned interventions disrupted the transport chain and other traffic, hitting freight and passenger customers alike.

Reading each vehicle, axle by axle

The basis of the fix was vehicle identification using RFID transponders, which let data be assigned to a vehicle on an axle-by-axle basis. Only at that resolution can a vehicle’s condition be tracked reliably across several train control units, so a developing fault shows up as a trend rather than as a sudden threshold breach.

In service, vehicle axles are detected by rail contacts installed on the track. Linking that axle data with the RFID read generates a business event carrying both the condition data and the individual vehicle data, which is what delivers real-time transparency on rail vehicle condition. Kathrein Solutions developed an app tailored to SBB that displays presence, vehicle number and axles on mobile devices, depicting each vehicle with each individual axle.

Trackside hardware that has to survive a Swiss winter

Transponders on the trains and readers installed in the track bed both need particular robustness against all weather, which is why the reader used was the Kathrein RAIN RFID Reader ARU 3500, designed for harsh environments. RAIN RFID is the industry’s name for passive UHF RFID, the long-range form in which a battery-free tag is powered by the reader’s own signal, so a tag bolted to a wagon needs no servicing of its own.

The ARU 3500’s internal antenna kept hardware costs down for single-track applications, where one reader does the whole job. For double-track detection, a second ARU 3500 is connected as a slave, and master and slave IDs configured on the main reader let each read be assigned to the right track. Kathrein equipped all of the train control facilities, approximately 70 locations, with RFID readers, and the rail vehicles were marked with an RFID tag in accordance with EN 17230. That standard, “Information technology – RFID in rail”, was published by CEN in November 2020 and sets out where tags sit on rolling stock, what data they carry and how trackside reads must perform, using UHF RFID to hold the European Vehicle Number electronically.

The performance requirement was blunt: every read had to deliver the vehicle number and the track number, reliably, across a speed range of 5 km/h to 180 km/h, in Swiss winter conditions including snow and heavy rain. In total, 68 detection points are distributed across the Swiss rail network, 14 of them single-track detections running one ARU 3500 and the rest double-track detections using the master and slave pair.

Getting the data to the people who own the vehicles

Once the readers have captured the data, Kathrein CrossTalk software transfers it to the app built for SBB, with each reading point sending to three servers: productive, backup and test. CrossTalk also integrates the RFID hardware into SBB’s leading system, and the CrossTalk Agent makes each reader able to report its own status data, so reader health is monitored centrally through an SBB internal system rather than by sending anybody to the track.

Planning, installation and commissioning of the RFID infrastructure was carried out by Enkom AG, a Swiss communications infrastructure and systems integration firm in Sursee that Kathrein acquired in 2016. Kathrein backed it with maintenance and support, and on key questions during the project.

From an identifier to a maintenance method

What began as RFID-based identification for the sake of transparency turned into a new quality management approach in infrastructure maintenance. Real-time data on component condition and the onset of wear works as a digital early warning system, flagging a repair before it becomes urgent, so maintenance can be planned precisely without risking the timetable. Kathrein’s benefit list runs from predictive maintenance and passenger safety to investment protection for rails, overhead lines and train components, all of which take the punishment when a defective vehicle stays in traffic, and cost reduction by avoiding unplanned and unnecessarily expensive repairs. The digitised data is visualised on a terminal showing exactly which rail vehicle has a problem, which removes a labour-intensive search.

“We see vehicle identification using RFID in Rail as an enabler technology that digitizes all processes that rely on a vehicle ID.” – Stefan Koller, Head of Train Control Systems, SBB AG

The tag does not do the maintenance; it supplies the one piece of data, a trustworthy vehicle ID, that every digital process downstream was waiting on. Kathrein does not date the rollout in its case study, so the figures above describe the installation as published rather than a timeline. More deployments of this kind sit in our case studies and vehicle tracking sections.

Read more at https://kathrein-solutions.com/de/case-studies/case-study-schweizerische-bundesbahnen-fahrzeugidentifikation-2

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The missing tissue, and the figures that do not add up

North Kansas City Hospital is an acute care hospital in north Kansas City, Missouri, described in the case study as a metropolitan medical center with strengths in cardiac, cancer, orthopedics, emergency and women’s health.

Before the system went in, the case study says, 10 or more tissues went missing from inventory every month, and it puts the annual financial impact at approximately $35,941. It then states separately that up to 5,000 tissues were unaccounted for from a patient billing perspective.

Those three figures sit awkwardly together and it is worth saying so plainly. The case study gives no time period for the 5,000 and never reconciles it against either the monthly loss rate or the annual dollar figure. Ten or more items a month comes to roughly 120 a year, a long way short of 5,000, and the document does not explain the gap. Each number is reported here as the case study states it, not combined or averaged into a claim it does not make. The hospital also concluded, according to the document, that the work would deliver significant staff savings alongside better savings through less unaccounted-for inventory.

What went in

The hospital went live with Terso Solutions’ automated inventory management system, installing RAIN RFID-enabled intelligent cabinets and integrating them with TrackCore Operating Room, TrackCore Inc.’s tissue and implant tracking software. RAIN RFID is passive UHF RFID in the 860 to 960 MHz band, working to the ISO 18000-63 and EPC Gen2 air interface, the same technology family behind retail stock counts and pallet tracking. Other terms used here are defined in the RFID glossary.

Underneath sits Jetstream, Terso’s cloud platform for collecting and forwarding data from its enclosures. The case study says this combination lets the hospital integrate with its electronic health record, the digital patient chart holding clinical and billing data, so inventory records are accessible in real time rather than reconciled after the fact.

Why a cabinet reads better than a shelf

An RFID enclosure is a very different proposition from an open shelf or a room-level read, and the difference is physics rather than software. A metal cabinet is a shielded, bounded read zone. Close the door and the reader sees everything inside it and nothing outside it, so you get a near-complete inventory on every door close, with no stray reads drifting in from the corridor and no ambiguity about whether an item is in the cupboard or in someone’s hand. Open-environment UHF deployments spend most of their commissioning effort on exactly those two problems: reads from stock that was never in scope, and missed reads from items shadowed by metal, liquid or each other.

That is why enclosures reach accuracy levels open deployments struggle with, and why high-value, low-volume, tightly regulated stock suits them so well. Allograft tissue, meaning human tissue such as bone, skin or tendon recovered from a donor for implantation into a patient, is close to the ideal case: expensive, individually traceable by regulation, stored in small quantities and serious to lose track of.

The cabinet is also an access control point, and that is what carries the compliance claims. Because someone has to authenticate to open the door, the system records who opened it and what left, which is what a chain of custody consists of. The case study lists compliance with all joint commission standards among the outcomes; the Joint Commission is the United States body that accredits hospitals and sets the standards they are inspected against. It also claims real-time visibility of all inventory on hand, an end to multiple tracking systems and manual reconciling, tissue and implants tracked from vendor to receipt to patient, and complete control over who has access. Since implementation, it says, the hospital has had no instances of missing tissue, and it plans to grow the system over the coming years by adding RFID-enabled refrigerators and freezers.

St Dominic Hospital: nurse hours and FDA paperwork

The same document covers a second deployment where the benefit described is a different one. St Dominic Hospital is a 502-bed not-for-profit general and surgical center in Jackson, Mississippi, offering cancer care, cardiovascular care and health education among other services.

Its problem was partly geographic. Tissue and implants were stored in a separate area of the hospital, with over 200 pieces of stored tissue on any given day, so trips to find needed inventory were time consuming and created extra work for nurses and staff during critical procedures. The case study also says numerous pieces of tissue were considered lost or missing every month, and that nurses spent hours trying to reconcile stock.

The fix was the same pairing of Terso Solutions’ RAIN RFID-enabled technology with TrackCore Operating Room, and the claimed results lean on traceability rather than shrinkage. If a question arises about a particular piece of tissue, the case study says, a report immediately shows everyone who touched it, from arrival on the receiving dock to implantation in a patient. It calls access to regulatory data and FDA documentation inside the software a large benefit, and says the system tracks expiration date, recalls and location. Nurses no longer spend time reconciling inventory, which it says has greatly increased staff morale and contributes to better patient outcomes.

Jason Merrill, Materials Manager at St. Dominic Hospital, is quoted saying “there are now no questions as to which vendors are FDA-certified, plus all patient charges are captured in real-time and automatically sent directly to the vendor through the software.” St Dominic has since rolled the same solution out in its wound care center, and the case study says it is assessing other opportunities in the hospital.

The pattern these studies follow

TrackCore, Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. TrackCore Operating Room launched in 2006 and is its flagship product, built to strip the manual processes out of tissue and implant handling, and the case study says it is now in over 425 hospitals across the United States. The line has since extended to consumable tracking and to automating the bill-only process for consigned special-order implants, the arrangement where a supplier leaves stock on site at no charge and invoices only what a procedure uses.

The same site carries comparable studies from Froedtert Hospital, which implemented RAIN RFID technology, and from Reston Hospital with InVita Healthcare Technologies, where the stated starting point was writing off approximately $200,000 worth of inventory. The shape is consistent: a large stated loss before, a small or zero stated loss after, and a vendor telling the story.

Nothing in any of it is implausible. Shielded enclosures do deliver the read accuracy claimed for them, and tissue inventory is exactly the stock where that accuracy converts straight into money and compliance. But anyone costing a similar project should note what is absent: no independent verification, no dates for the deployments themselves, no system cost, and so no way to work out a payback period against the $35,941 a year. The case for RFID enclosures in tissue storage is not weakened by that. It just has to be built on your own numbers rather than someone else’s. More deployments of this kind sit in the healthcare category and the case studies archive.

Read more at https://www.tersosolutions.com/resources/trackcore-implements-tracking-solution-for-tissues-and-implants-at-hospitals

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

On 31 January 2026, Motor1 wrote up a TikTok video. Jay Pichardo, a car salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Manchester, New Hampshire, who posts as @jay_sellsbenz, had filmed the sidewall of a Michelin Pilot Sport 4S and circled the RFID marking in red. “Michelin, I have questions,” he said. “Why is there an RFID tag on a tire? Explain that to me.” The clip had passed 17,600 views when JT Wilson covered it, and Carscoops, SlashGear and BGR followed.

Nothing new had happened. Michelin, the French tyre maker, had been building that tag into production tyres for about a decade. What was new was that a non-specialist audience noticed, and that many of them assumed it was there to watch them. The comments read as free market research: guesses at pressure monitoring, logistics, recall tracking and litigation records, and one landing on counterfeit verification with “So u know it’s real”.

Ten years of tagging, almost entirely unnoticed

The technique predates Michelin’s programme. Tire Review reported on 30 July 2014 that Goodyear brought RFID to NASCAR in 2000, and that the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship pioneered pit-lane tyre scanning to police spec-tyre allocation. Most of those tags came from Hana Technologies, a maker of embeddable tyre tags with roots in microelectronics and watch production; chief executive John Erdmann told RFID Journal on 13 March 2025 that Hana tags have run in NASCAR since 2006 and MotoGP since 2016. The ambition is old: Michelin hired Hana RFID in 2012 for bus tyres at the London Olympics, and Kumho Tire, the South Korean maker, said in 2013 it planned to tag all 35 million tyres it built annually.

Volume came with trucks. Ralph Dimenna, then chief operating officer of Michelin Americas Truck Tires, told the American Trucking Associations Technology and Maintenance Council meeting in Nashville in February 2017: “Michelin is the first manufacturer to integrate RFID into its full commercial truck tire portfolio.” Heavy Duty Trucking reported on 28 February 2017 that installation began in July 2016, and that around 98% of Michelin’s global commercial truck output was already built with an embedded chip.

Why it took a decade: heat, flex and steel

A tyre is close to the worst home you can give a passive UHF RFID tag. These are battery-free tags read in the 860 to 960 MHz band, branded RAIN RFID by the alliance that promotes them, and the tyre brief is brutal: survive vulcanisation, a million kilometres of flexing and retreading, transmit through rubber loaded with steel, and last the tyre’s life, because the tag can never be swapped out. Our RFID glossary covers the terminology and the UHF hub the wider context.

Michelin’s answer is its fourth-generation tag, described by Claire Swedberg for RFID Journal on 1 August 2024. A 37 millimetre coiled antenna sits horizontally across the sidewall, embedded in the rubber layers where mechanical constraint reaches the chip least, twisting and bending to absorb thermal and mechanical stress. Earlier generations needed a Chemloc adhesive coating to bond the tag to the rubber; Gen 4 drops it, and its tyre-compatible material survives recycling. “The integration inside the tire is much easier,” said Laurent Couturier, Michelin’s RFID system designer.

The less-told story is that the universal tag keeps losing to the bespoke one. Hana builds the Direct Attach tag, a small PCB wired to an antenna, and the Linkless Tag, developed at Michelin’s request from 2017, in which a spring is the antenna and the chip floats at its centre. Linkless is the better idea on paper, but RFID Journal reported in March 2025 that “long-term industry experience finds that customized implementations often provided better performance, leading tire manufacturers to continue to use the Direct Attached tag”.

Who actually makes the tags

To be precise about supply: in May 2024 Murata, the Japanese components maker, licensed the Gen 4 design from Michelin for mass production from January 2025. RFID Journal reported that Michelin “is also working with Beontag and Hana RFID to produce more tire-specified RFID tags to support the demand that is coming”, and Beontag announced its own Michelin partnership on 12 June 2024. Hana has supplied over 250 million tyre tags, and its branding and business strategist Val Peters offers a line any RF engineer will respect: “we never heard about an electronic failure due to breakage of the tag. It’s just never happened.” Michelin’s own volume, per Couturier in August 2024, was around 50 million tyres, with passenger cars worldwide the next target at roughly 100 million. Consumer outlets reporting that 100 million as a fitted total have read a target as an achievement.

2026 is the year the rest of the industry caught up

One manufacturer tagging tyres is a logistics project; an industry agreeing how to read each other’s tags is a platform. ISO 20910 gave the sector a common numbering scheme for tyre tags in 2019, and Michelin cites it alongside ISO 20909; see our standards coverage. Above it sits the Global Data Service Organization for Tires and Automotive Components, or GDSO, a Belgian non-profit founded in early 2022 by Michelin, Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear and Pirelli to standardise tyre data and resolve each tyre’s SGTIN-96 identifier.

Its timeline is the strongest evidence that something changed. GDSO registered as a liaison organisation with CEN-CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24 on Digital Product Passports on 1 October 2025, and Toyo Tires joined as a full member in September 2025, its traceability programme covered here on 18 December 2025. On 12 February 2026 GDSO signed a memorandum of understanding with the RAIN Alliance, whose Tyres Masterclass of 23 April 2026 handles education, and on 8 April 2026 it launched a North American lifecycle services ecosystem for services, governance and pilots. Then on 12 August 2026 Linglong Tire became the first Chinese manufacturer to take full membership, which is when a European founders’ club starts to look like a world standard.

Continental, the German tyre and automotive supplier, announced the Conti Hybrid HT 5 trailer tyre on 16 February 2026, completing its Conti Hybrid Generation 5 family, and said plainly that “All tires are also equipped with RFID sensors”. That is a commercial trailer line, not a passenger-car rollout, and fellow GDSO founders Bridgestone and Pirelli publish no volumes at all. Accounts of the first carmaker mandate conflict, with RFID Journal putting Volvo’s in the late 2010s and Impinj at 2021. Either way it is vehicle tracking of a quietly consequential kind.

The regulation nobody can date yet

Published timings for the rules conflict wildly. Motor1 said digital product passports would be required for tyres from 2027; Beontag’s June 2024 release said the requirement “will comes into effect for tires from 2028-2030”. As of 20 October 2026, tyres are a priority product group in the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation working plan for 2025 to 2030, but no delegated act for tyres exists or has been proposed, so no date is legally fixed. The years conflict because adoption and application differ: trackers expect adoption around 2027 plus a transition of at least eighteen months, putting real obligations at 2029 at the earliest, and those are estimates, not law. The plumbing runs ahead of the rules, since the EU’s central DPP registry went live on 20 July 2026 and we set out what those rules mean for RFID on 19 August 2026.

Not location tracking, but not nothing either

Back to the salesman with the phone. Michelin’s published position, on its RFID page as fetched on 20 October 2026, is clear and technically accurate. The tag holds “the tyre’s unique identifier” in SGTIN-96 format, compliant with ISO 20909 and ISO 20910. A standard read returns the commercial designation, meaning size, brand and range, while “any other information related to the RFID of the tyre is subject to the prior permission of the tyre user”. The identifier, the company says, “can’t give access to personal data without the consent of the person concerned” and is “comparable to a tyre-specific serial number”. That is true: no GPS, no clock, no record of where the tyre has been.

Now the half the industry says less often. The identifier is unique and permanent, because once embedded, as Michelin states, “the tyre identifier can’t be changed and the tag can’t be deactivated without damaging the tyre”. And the read range is not a few centimetres: RFID Journal put it at “on average, the tags can be read at distances from two or three to five meters”. So anyone standing near a parked car with a handheld can collect four permanent unique serials tied to that vehicle, without touching it and without the owner knowing. That is not location tracking. It is also not nothing, because a persistent unique identifier readable at a distance is the raw material from which location histories get built.

Michelin’s safeguard is real but narrow. Asked who can read the tag, it answers: “Anyone who has a scanner, the associated API and is authorised by the consumer to collect information about them.” The protection sits in the API and in contract, not in the tyre, and the owner cannot verify who has read their serials, switch the tag off, or audit whether those access controls are honoured.

The sector’s failure is not the engineering, which is excellent, nor the privacy design, which is defensible. It is that ten years and tens of millions of tagged tyres went by without anyone explaining this to the people buying the tyres. So when the explanation reached a mass audience in January 2026, it was framed not by Michelin, GDSO or the RAIN Alliance, but by a thirty second video asking why there is a chip in the thing you drive on.

So is this the breakthrough?

On the evidence, yes, with one caveat. The engineering argument is settled: Gen 4 solved embedding, durability through retreading and recyclability, and Hana reports no electronic failures from breakage across more than 250 million tags. The shared data layer, which turns tagged tyres into an industry capability rather than one maker’s private asset, visibly accelerated across 2025 and 2026, and European regulation will eventually make tyre identification compulsory, even if nobody can yet date it.

The caveat is the one Pichardo stumbled into. Fleets need no persuading, but passenger cars are the 100 million unit prize, and those tyres are bought by people who have just learned from TikTok, rather than from the companies responsible, that there is an unremovable, remotely readable serial number in something they own. Peters told RFID Journal in March 2025: “We’ve come such a long way as an industry in making [tire tracking] possible, but at the end of the day we’re still at the beginning.” That looks right. What slows this down now is not tag physics, steel interference or read range. It is consumer trust, and the sector has ten years of silence to make up for.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Where RFID Meets the WMS

The integration between RFID infrastructure and a WMS typically happens through middleware that translates raw EPC data from readers into actionable events the WMS can consume. At the protocol level, most modern WMS platforms expose RESTful APIs or support message queues such as MQTT and AMQP. RFID middleware, whether from Zebra, Impinj, or a custom LLRP-based stack, filters and deduplicates tag reads before forwarding them as structured inventory events. This decoupled architecture means the RFID layer can be upgraded or swapped without rewriting WMS business logic.

The key integration points fall into five operational stages: receiving, put-away, pick-and-pack, cycle counting, and shipping.

Receiving Workflows

When a pallet or carton arrives at a dock door, fixed UHF RFID readers mounted on the portal capture every tagged item as it passes through. The middleware cross-references each EPC against the Advance Shipping Notice (ASN) already loaded in the WMS, flagging discrepancies instantly. Instead of a warehouse operative scanning each case individually, the entire inbound shipment can be verified in seconds. The WMS receives a receipt confirmation event, updates on-hand inventory, and triggers the next step in the workflow automatically.

This approach cuts receiving labour by as much as 90 percent in high-volume facilities and virtually eliminates keying errors that cascade into downstream picking problems.

Put-Away Optimisation

Once goods are received, the WMS issues put-away directives based on velocity, product dimensions, and storage rules. RFID adds a verification layer here that barcodes struggle to match. As a forklift operator deposits a pallet into a racking location, overhead or aisle-mounted readers confirm that the correct items have been placed in the correct bin. If the tag reads do not match the expected location assignment, the WMS can immediately send a corrective alert to the operator handheld or vehicle-mount terminal.

Over time, the read data also feeds slotting analytics. The WMS can identify which SKUs are consistently placed in suboptimal locations and recommend re-slotting to reduce travel time, a feedback loop that would be impractical to maintain with manual scan data alone.

Pick-and-Pack Verification

Order accuracy is where RFID integration delivers some of its most measurable ROI. During wave or batch picking, operatives working through a pick list can have their completed totes or cartons validated by an RFID tunnel or desktop reader at a pack station. The reader captures every EPC in the container and the middleware compares the list against the WMS order lines. Any missing or unexpected item triggers an exception before the carton is sealed.

For operations handling high-value goods, apparel, or pharmaceuticals, this level of automated verification replaces manual piece-count checks entirely. Error rates in facilities using RFID-verified packing typically fall below 0.1 percent.

Shipping Confirmation

The final integration point mirrors the receiving workflow in reverse. As packed cartons pass through an outbound dock-door portal, the readers capture a complete manifest of every item leaving the building. The middleware reconciles this against the WMS shipment record and, if everything matches, triggers carrier label generation, ASN transmission to the customer, and inventory deduction in a single automated sequence.

If a carton is missing or an incorrect item is detected, the WMS can halt the shipment and alert the dock supervisor before the trailer departs. This last line of defence prevents costly short-ships and mispicks from reaching the end customer.

Technical Architecture Considerations

Deploying RFID within a WMS environment requires attention to several infrastructure details. Reader placement and antenna tuning must account for the RF environment of the warehouse, including metal racking, conveyor systems, and neighbouring read zones that could cause stray reads. GS1 EPC encoding standards should be followed to ensure interoperability across trading partners.

On the software side, the middleware layer needs robust event filtering, including RSSI thresholds, dwell-time logic, and zone-based deduplication, to ensure the WMS receives clean, trustworthy data rather than a flood of raw observations. Many organisations also implement an EPCIS repository alongside the WMS to maintain a full audit trail of every tag event for compliance and traceability purposes.

Network bandwidth and latency matter too. A busy dock door reading 500 tags per second can generate significant throughput, so the link between readers, middleware, and WMS should be sized accordingly, with failover buffering in case of temporary connectivity loss.

The Bigger Picture

RFID and WMS integration is not a plug-and-play project, but it is a well-understood one. The technology standards are mature, the middleware ecosystem is broad, and the ROI benchmarks from early adopters are well documented. For warehouses still relying on barcode-only workflows, the question is no longer whether RFID integration makes sense, but how quickly the transition can be planned and executed.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Those are two separate programmes, run by different parts of the organisation for different reasons, and most coverage runs them together. Doing so buries the point. Both are RFID, both sit in the same UHF band, and after this round of work a locomotive leaving Kharagpur can be carrying two unrelated RFID systems that, on everything published, know nothing about each other.

Kavach is an RFID story before anyone mentions asset tags

Kavach is India’s indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection system, adopted as the national ATP standard in July 2020 after first passenger-train field trials in February 2016. It brakes automatically if the driver does not respond to a warning, prevents signal passed at danger events, enforces speed restrictions and gives continuous cab signalling through the Driver Machine Interface. Version 4.0 was approved on 16 July 2024 by the Research Designs and Standards Organisation, the standards and design body of Indian Railways, and is specified to SIL-4, the most demanding safety integrity level in railway functional safety.

The position input underneath all of that is RFID. When Kavach 4.0 was commissioned on South Central Railway in September 2026 we covered the trackside half in detail: passive UHF tags at 865 to 867 MHz, the band allocated to the technology in India, built to specification RDSO/SPN/196, required to read reliably at train speeds of at least 200 km/h, and installed at density, 3,746 tags across three sections on that commissioning alone.

The locomotive end is the other half, and it is a reader installation. Each Kavach loco unit carries two RFID readers in hot standby, mounted underneath the locomotive body, rated to 200 km/h and to at least IP65 outside the locomotive or IP64 inside. Locomotives work out distance travelled from wheel rotations, and that odometry drifts, because wheels wear down, slip under power and lock up under braking. Every trackside tag the reader passes resets the on-board calculation to a surveyed location, with tags installed in duplicate for redundancy. Each read is an ordinary passive UHF transaction, the reader supplying the energy and the tag replying with its identifier; the terms used here are in our RFID glossary.

So fourteen locomotives fitted with Kavach means twenty-eight UHF readers fitted. Trackside tags on their own do nothing: they are inert until a fitted locomotive passes over them, which is why loco shed throughput, not tag installation, decides when a route is actually protected.

Fourteen locomotives against the national arithmetic

A Press Information Bureau release from the Ministry of Railways dated 19 March 2025, giving progress to February 2025, put Kavach in 795 locomotives, with trackside equipment on 3,727 route km and Kavach at 664 stations. It confirmed that the project for equipping 10,000 locomotives had been finalised and that 69 loco sheds had been prepared to do the fitting, at roughly Rs 50 lakh per km of trackside and station equipment and Rs 80 lakh per locomotive.

By 31 July 2026, according to figures reported by Indian Infrastructure on 7 August 2026, Kavach was installed in 6,290 locomotives, with work taken up to equip a further 7,190 locomotives and 1,200 EMU and MEMU trains. Kavach 4.0 had been commissioned on 2,633 route km of the two high density routes, 1,423 route km from Delhi to Mumbai and 1,210 route km from Delhi to Howrah, and trackside work was being taken up across 21,794 route km, with equipment installed on 7,726 route km of that.

From 795 locomotives in February 2025 to 6,290 in July 2026 is a hard acceleration, and it shows the sheds have found a rhythm. But 6,290 fitted plus 7,190 under way is still short of a requirement already sanctioned at 10,000 locomotives, and every one of them has to pass through a shed exactly like Kharagpur. The pace-setter is Northern Railway’s Ghaziabad Electric Loco Shed, reported in November 2024 to have deployed Kavach on 100 locomotives and, according to The Pioneer, to have reached its 300th installation on 16 May 2026, the fastest in Indian Railways. South Eastern Railway’s own stated plan, reported in November 2024, is to complete Kavach deployment across its network by 2028. Fourteen locomotives in ten weeks is real progress, and it is also the unit of work that deadline is made of.

The asset tags are a completely different programme

The RFID asset tagging at Kharagpur belongs to the Automatic Identification and Data Capture programme for rolling stock, usually shortened to AIDC. It is led by the Rolling Stock department, with solutions developed by the Centre for Railway Information Systems, the IT arm of Indian Railways, working with GS1 India, the Indian member organisation of the global standards body behind the barcode. The Railway Board sanctioned two works for it totalling Rs 112.96 crore. Its purpose has nothing to do with signalling: it is the shift from time-based maintenance, where a vehicle is attended to on a calendar, to condition-based maintenance driven by its own history.

Architecturally it is close to the inverse of Kavach. The tag goes on the vehicle and the reader sits at the trackside, roughly 3,500 fixed readers planned, reporting to a central control centre over GS1’s Low Level Reader Protocol. Indian Railways specified the GS1 GIAI-202 standard, the Global Individual Asset Identifier encoding, because connectivity along the network is patchy: the tags carry a user memory area, so a reader can pull the vehicle’s information off the tag without reaching a backend system. CRIS-designed GIAI-202 tags have been field-tested at 182.7 km/h.

The programme is well behind its original intent. The target was all rolling stock, roughly 350,000 vehicles, tagged by 2021, and it was missed. Published progress runs to roughly 22,000 wagons and 1,200 coaches, later reported as around 23,000 wagons against a December 2022 target of covering the whole wagon fleet. More recent totals are not publicly confirmed, so nobody outside Indian Railways knows the current number. What the South Eastern Railway statement does show is that locomotives, as opposed to wagons and coaches, are only now being tagged at shed level, and in single figures.

Two RFID systems, one locomotive, one band

Put the two programmes on the same vehicle and the question writes itself. A Kavach-fitted, asset-tagged locomotive leaves Kharagpur carrying two UHF readers underneath its body, reading trackside tags at 865 to 867 MHz for safety-critical positioning, and a GS1 GIAI-202 asset tag that fixed trackside readers in the same band interrogate for identification and maintenance. Same frequency allocation, same vehicle, two departments, two standards lineages, one certified to SIL-4 and the other not safety-related at all.

There is a respectable argument that this is exactly right. Mixing an administrative identification system into a SIL-4 safety case is an expensive way to make that case harder to defend, and separation keeps the two sets of equipment on separate maintenance and approval regimes. There is an equally respectable argument that a railway installing two independent RFID populations in one band, on one fleet, through one shed, pays twice for surveying, mounting, cabling, testing and spares, and passes up the obvious prize: a locomotive that already knows its own identity and its own surveyed position and could report both from one system. Nothing published resolves which it is.

That is the question worth putting to CRIS and to RDSO. Do the Kavach on-board readers and the AIDC asset tags share any infrastructure at all, in reader hardware, antenna placement, survey data, the backhaul carrying reads to a control centre, or the band planning that keeps two tag populations from reading into each other at a station throat? Or is a locomotive leaving an Indian loco shed in 2026 simply carrying two independent RFID systems, fitted by two teams, that happen to use the same radio? There is more on identifying vehicles in motion in our vehicle tracking coverage.

Read more at https://ser.indianrailways.gov.in/view_section.jsp?lang=0&id=0,1,1683,1690

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Physical-Digital Twins and the Role of RFID

The concept of a “digital twin” has existed in manufacturing and supply chain circles for years. A digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical object, updated in real time with data from sensors, tags, and connected systems. RFID is uniquely suited to anchor this relationship. Each tagged item carries a unique identifier encoded on its RFID inlay, linking it to a corresponding digital asset stored on a cloud platform or blockchain ledger.

When a consumer purchases an RFID-tagged handbag, for instance, the tag’s unique Electronic Product Code (EPC) can be mapped to a 3D-rendered version of that same handbag within a metaverse environment. The owner taps or scans the physical item using an NFC-enabled smartphone, and their digital avatar is instantly equipped with a verified virtual version of the product. The physical tag acts as the authentication key, ensuring the digital twin can only be claimed by the rightful owner of the real item.

Luxury Brands Leading the Way

Luxury fashion houses have been among the first to explore this territory. Several high-profile brands have begun embedding UHF RFID and NFC inlays into garments, footwear, and accessories, not just for supply chain visibility, but as a gateway to exclusive digital content. Some programmes offer holders of tagged limited-edition items access to virtual events, gated online communities, or wearable assets for use in gaming and social platforms.

The appeal is straightforward. For brands, it deepens customer engagement and creates new revenue streams without manufacturing additional physical inventory. For consumers, it transforms a purchase into a multi-layered experience that extends well beyond the shop floor.

Authentication Challenges and Opportunities

One of the most compelling use cases is authentication. Counterfeiting remains a significant concern across luxury goods, pharmaceuticals, and collectibles. RFID-based authentication, where each item’s tag is cryptographically paired with its digital twin, makes forgery significantly harder. A counterfeit item would lack the correctly encoded RFID inlay needed to unlock its virtual counterpart, providing an instant verification mechanism for both brands and buyers.

This model also opens the door to secondary markets. When a tagged item changes hands, the RFID scan can trigger a transfer of digital ownership, creating a transparent chain of provenance that follows the item through its entire lifecycle.

What Comes Next

The metaverse is still evolving, and much of this remains early-stage. But the underlying technology is not speculative. RFID tagging at item level is already deployed at scale in retail, logistics, and healthcare. The infrastructure to support physical-digital linking exists today. What is changing is the demand. As consumers spend more time in virtual environments and expect their physical purchases to carry digital value, the role of RFID as the connective layer between these worlds will only grow.

The brands and technology providers that invest in this integration now will be best positioned when the metaverse moves from novelty to norm.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Dürr Systems is a German machine and plant engineering group working in automation, digitalisation and energy efficiency across 33 countries, with the automotive industry as its main market. Kathrein Solutions is a German RFID specialist that designs antennas, readers and transponders for industrial environments. The Ingolstadt topcoat line paints the interior and exterior of the Audi Q6 e-tron series, and Dürr used the same project to mark its 18,000th painting robot.

Up to 80 atomisers and no paper trail

Every Dürr atomiser is built with a quick-change device, so that if a fault appears the unit can be swapped and production restarted quickly, keeping line downtime short. The side effect is a real risk of mix-ups. A paint shop can run up to 80 atomisers, and at the maintenance benches the atomisers, bell cups, turbines, valves and shaping air rings sit close together, all needing to be identified, worked on and put back into the booth at speed.

Until the RFID system went in, the trail of which part had been in which robot, and when, was lost almost immediately. Production and maintenance sit in different locations, and the check on a part often does not happen in the same shift, which made both the communication path and the per-part documentation difficult. That history is exactly what an operator wants. To capture it, Dürr now fits every component of its latest atomiser generation, the EcoBell4, with an RFID transponder, pushing asset tracking right down to the level of a single wear part.

A new antenna geometry for a metal booth

Paint booths are metal almost everywhere, and metal shields radio signals. Conventional tags that manage long read ranges in open applications simply do not work in that environment, which is why no off-the-shelf RFID system existed for paint shops before this one. Dürr and Kathrein Solutions engineers therefore developed a transponder with its own individual antenna geometry for each component of the atomiser, with the chip and antenna range designed so the radio waves penetrate all the materials involved. Inside the booth, Kathrein Low Range antennas are used for the lowest susceptibility to interference; outside it, Wide Range antennas. Both supply the passive transponders with energy.

Three kilobytes of history on the part itself

The transponders are read-write, so operating data is recorded directly on the component rather than only in a back-end system. Each component type has its own data record: a valve reports its number of switching cycles, a bell cup its revolutions or the quantity of paint processed. From those counts a service life is calculated, which the customer can adjust to suit its own practice.

The tags use NXP UCODE DNA chips, a UHF chip family built on EPC Gen2V2 and ISO 18000-63, which makes this a RAIN RFID deployment. Storage runs to 3KB, enough for substantial information chains, and the chip carries the ISO/IEC 29167-10 crypto suite so sensitive data can be encrypted with AES 128-bit. The infrastructure also links a PC to a central database holding the RFID data for one or more paint lines, with the maintenance bench connected to the same database. Because the information lives both on the atomiser and in the database, a worker can read the current status of an atomiser and its components either at the bench or at the line.

Catching the wrong bell cup before the paint flows

Manual installation invited a specific and expensive error: a bell cup fitted in the wrong paint booth, or set up for the wrong painting process. The paint result suffered, and in practice the mistake might only surface after several bodies had been incorrectly coated, with considerable rework to follow. In the new Audi line the readers automatically identify every component by its unique identification number, and if a part has been swapped incorrectly or is missing the system warns the operator with a pop-up window before the painting process starts.

Maintenance driven by wear, not by the calendar

At the RFID maintenance bench the technician sees all the specifications of a component together with its maintenance history. That history is what makes demand-driven maintenance possible: only genuinely worn parts are replaced, so component life is used fully and maintenance cost comes down. Plant availability rises as well, because operating staff can plan maintenance in advance instead of reacting to a failure.

The bench is also set up to keep maintenance quality consistent. Video tutorials walk even semi-skilled staff step by step through each procedure, covering the right tool, the consumables needed and the actual steps for individual assembly elements or for a whole atomiser. The workstation holds the required tools and a printer, so a label showing details such as operating hours and the date of the last repair can be attached to a part. Anyone in the production plant can then see at a glance that an atomiser has been serviced and freshly reconditioned.

Paint saved, and a smaller footprint for the plant

Audi set out to make the new topcoat line both sustainable and highly productive. Rebuilding this one line accounts for half of the plant’s topcoat capacity, so the environmental gain shows up in the footprint of the whole Ingolstadt site. Much of that comes from the EcoBell4 itself: its patented 4-main-needle technology significantly reduces total paint consumption and allows a colour change in roughly four seconds with minimal loss of paint and rinsing agent. Dürr puts the paint saved at enough to produce 12,500 additional bodies, and cites lower operating costs and reduced VOC emissions. Audi is also using Dürr’s EcoSupply P colour supply system with pigging technology on the project. The RFID layer sits on top of all of it, digitalising the atomiser so processes can be optimised, errors cut and availability raised.

Read more at https://kathrein-solutions.com/de/case-studies/audi-setzt-auf-rfid-system-von-duerr-und-kathrein-solutions-fuer-bedarfsgesteuerte-instandhaltung

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The published feature list mixes visual merchandising with in-store technology: an enhanced exterior, a new “river-runway” installation showing runway-inspired looks and current trends, an expanded denim department carrying more silhouettes and washes, larger and modernised fitting rooms, and a revised layout. Two items on that list matter to anyone following retail RFID. The first is “weight-sensing self-service checkouts using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology”. The second is what River Island calls “WW Smart Fitting Rooms”, which let a customer request an alternative size or another product without leaving the cubicle.

Mel Aucott, Retail Director at River Island, said the opening “represents an important step change in River Island’s bricks-and-mortar presence”. Kevin Duffy, Centre Director at centre:mk, said the store “brings something fresh to the destination’s existing quality line up of fashion retailers”.

A concept store, not a first deployment

The launch coverage reads as though RFID has just arrived at River Island. It has not. The retailer has been running item-level UHF RFID across its entire chain since 2017. In November 2016 RFID Journal reported a planned deployment across 280 stores in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium, built on Nedap’s iD Cloud. Nedap is a Dutch technology company whose retail division sells item-level stock management; iD Cloud is its cloud-hosted EPC UHF platform, the passive air interface, also marketed as RAIN RFID, that reads hundreds of garment tags a second at a few metres. Store teams read stock with !D Hand 2 handheld readers paired over Bluetooth to Android devices running the iD Cloud app. Nedap tells us the !D Hand 2 has since left its portfolio and that River Island has since moved to Zebra’s RFD40 handheld.

The tag silicon was specified at the time too. The pilot used Alien Technology Higgs 4 inlays supplied by Byways Group, and the full rollout moved to Impinj Monza R6-P. Alien Technology and Impinj are the two long-established American chip suppliers for passive UHF garment tags. Jon Wright, Head of Global Loss Prevention and Safety at River Island, and Danny Haak, then iD Cloud Product Manager at Nedap Retail, ran a three-month, three-store pilot that returned 97 per cent inventory accuracy, sales above expectation and all three of its KPIs met, with installation following mainly from May to October 2017.

Self-checkout came later and from a different supplier. Keonn, a Barcelona-based RFID hardware manufacturer, published a River Island case study covering its AdvanGo RFID self-checkout and AdvanPay RFID point-of-sale readers: a two-store pilot, then six stores live, then a further 24 scheduled for 2024, with the UK tag specialist Tag Company managing and integrating the solution. Keonn’s stated outcomes were shorter queues, a better shopping experience and greater visibility of a product’s life in store.

River Island has also put numbers on the record itself. Speaking at Retail Technology Show in London on 24 to 25 April 2024, Chief Information Officer Simon Pakenham-Walsh, who joined from Sweaty Betty, said the RFID rollout was complete company-wide, that stock accuracy had improved from roughly 70 per cent to 98 per cent, and that self-checkout had reached 60 per cent adoption across the store network. He also described fitting room screens then in trial, showing a customer what they had tried on and letting them talk to a store associate, which had cut returns by 40 per cent and made customers 50 per cent more likely to buy when they requested extra sizes or products through an associate. He said River Island planned to extend RFID into garment care labels.

The weight-sensing claim deserves a closer look

Set against seven years of existing deployment, the one technically novel line in the centre:mk announcement is weight sensing on an RFID self-checkout, and it is an odd pairing. An RFID self-checkout reads every EPC in the basket or on the pedestal, so the till already knows exactly which items are present without anyone scanning a barcode. Weight verification is what supermarket self-checkouts use precisely because they cannot see what is in the bag: the scale confirms that what was scanned matches what was put down. In fashion, RFID is normally sold as the thing that removes the need for that check.

So either River Island has deliberately added a weight layer on top of the tag read as a shrink control, catching untagged, detagged or mis-tagged items the reader cannot see, which would be a notable piece of loss prevention engineering, or the two capabilities have been conflated somewhere in the press material. No source resolves it. The announcement names no supplier for the checkouts, and while Keonn hardware is in the chain elsewhere, nothing confirms it is the hardware at centre:mk or that weight sensing is part of it. Keonn’s own case study makes no mention of weight sensing at all.

WW Smart Fitting Rooms, with no vendor attached

“WW Smart Fitting Rooms” is the name River Island’s own announcement uses, and it has been repeated across the trade press. No vendor is identified, and “WW” does not map to any RFID or fitting room supplier, which suggests a garble somewhere in the supplied copy. For context, Nedap’s published River Island case study describes iD Cloud integrated with fitting room technology from Crave Retail, an American supplier of connected fitting room software, so that is the integration Nedap documents for the chain. It is not confirmed as the system installed at centre:mk, and it should not be read as an expansion of “WW”.

The vendor silence runs through the whole announcement. Every named supplier in this story, Nedap, Keonn, Tag Company, Crave Retail, Impinj and Alien Technology, comes from older case studies and press coverage about the chainwide estate. None of them appears in the centre:mk launch material.

What the underlying estate has delivered

Nedap’s River Island case study puts hard figures on the installed base, though it names no store count, no reader model and no River Island staff. It reports inventory accuracy above 98 per cent from weekly RFID cycle counts, on-shelf availability raised to over 99 per cent through real-time refill, and a stock reduction of 30 to 40 per cent while holding that availability. On the shop floor, 61 per cent of customers who tried a product on went on to buy it, and 84 per cent of customer assistance requests were handled by store teams within two minutes. Nedap also credits the system with removing the need for additional security measures, which allows hard tags to be dropped in selected stores in support of a seamless self-checkout experience, cutting labour cost and turning stock takes from hours into minutes.

Why a technology-led concept store in 2026

The commercial backdrop explains the timing. River Island announced a restructuring plan in August 2025 that closed 33 UK stores and renegotiated rents at 71 sites. For 2025 it reported a pre-tax profit of £11.6m, against an operating loss of £65.3m in 2024, with gross profit of £94.3m, up from £37m. Ben Lewis returned as Chief Executive and in June 2026 set out plans for new stores across the UK and Ireland alongside digital investment. A 12,800 sq ft concept store built around checkout and fitting room technology is what that plan looks like on the ground.

The thing to watch, as the concept moves into other stores, is whether the weight-sensing layer travels with it and which supplier is behind it. If it does, a chain that has run RFID since 2017 will have decided that reading the tag is no longer sufficient verification at the till, and that is a question for every fashion retailer with an RFID self-checkout programme. More on item-level deployments in retail.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Keio University SFC Research Institute is the research arm of Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, and is directed by Yuji Ohgi. JRC is a radio communications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Nakano, Tokyo, led by president and representative director Kaichiro Sakuma. UPR, based in Chiyoda, Tokyo, rents and manages pallets and other logistics equipment and is headed by representative director Yoshiya Sakata.

Smart Pallet is a pallet information management system UPR developed in 2015 and has now run for close to ten years. Each pallet carries a DX tag built by JRC, an active RFID device powered by a primary, non-rechargeable battery. It transmits intermittently rather than continuously and has a separate management mode, a design that supports a read range of up to 300 m while giving roughly ten years of service with no battery change. The system is used to locate pallets and to automate and streamline collection, washing and reuse.

The problem it addresses is a large one. Between 500 million and 600 million pallets are in use in Japan alone, and they circulate internationally as well. Storing, collecting, washing and keeping track of them is labour intensive and losses are common, so rental pallet use has grown year on year. That growth has been helped along by Japan’s “2024 problem”, the April 2024 cap on truck drivers’ overtime hours, which tightened haulage capacity and pushed shippers towards more efficient logistics.

Where an active-only tag runs out of road

Intermittent transmission is what buys the DX tag its ten-year battery life, but it also means you cannot talk to the tag at the moment you want to. Changing a setting meant waiting for the tag to transmit before it would respond. And if the battery did go flat, the pallet went dark: its location could no longer be confirmed at all.

There were two operational gaps on top of that. Pooled despatch and collection alongside other companies’ rental pallets, which carry standard UHF passive tags, meant fitting a second, separate passive tag to the Smart Pallet. So did batch goods-in checks that link tagged cargo to the pallet underneath it. Finally, while active RFID reaches a long way, long range is poor at pinpointing. Short-range passive reads can place a pallet to within a few metres.

One tag, two modes

The DXh tag keeps the DX tag’s active radio and adds a passive chip compliant with the ISO/IEC 18000-65 protocol, so reads and writes can be done quickly with no battery draw at all. ISO/IEC 18000-65 was approved as an international standard in February 2026 and defines the air interface and communication method for sensor-capable RFID, including data exchange in 920 MHz band active and passive systems. It sits alongside the better known ISO/IEC 18000-63, the UHF passive air interface equivalent to EPC Gen2.

Worth noting for readers outside Japan: 920 MHz is Japan’s UHF RFID band, the regional counterpart of 865 to 868 MHz in Europe and 902 to 928 MHz in the United States. Both of the DXh tag’s modes work inside that one band, which makes this a hybrid active-passive tag rather than a dual-frequency one.

Folding the passive interface into the same device is what unlocks the new behaviour. The three parties list four gains from building the DXh tag into Smart Pallet:

• changing system parameters, including the transmit radio frequency, on the spot
• ultra-low-power wake from a dormant state
• joint collection of pallets that already carry standard UHF passive tags
• high-speed association of tagged cargo with the pallet carrying it, for consignment tracking

A tag whose battery has died can also still be read, because the passive side needs no power of its own.

Tested at a pallet depot in Chiba

The three parties built a demonstration system around the DXh tag at UPR’s pallet depot in Ichihara City, Chiba Prefecture, and ran evaluation testing there in July 2026.

They make two world-first claims. The first is for the tag itself, as the world’s first 920 MHz band hybrid active-passive tag, qualified in the release’s own footnote as a first “as a 920 MHz band tag conforming to the ISO/IEC 18000 series” and based on research the three companies carried out themselves, dated 29 July 2026. The second is for the system, as the world’s first practical and demonstration case of an ISO/IEC 18000-65 compliant pallet information management system. Both are the companies’ own claims rather than independently verified positions.

The prototype was shown at the 28th Automatic Identification Expo at Tokyo Big Sight from 9 to 11 September 2026, alongside a related seminar, “2026 EPC RFID FORUM x Automatic Identification Expo”. The work includes results from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications programme “Research and Development for Expansion of Radio Wave Resources” (JPJ000254). The three say development of the new tag will continue from this prototype.

Read more at https://upr-net.co.jp/articles/news/pr/20260909

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Medigas Italia is one of the primary suppliers of home-based oxygen therapy and mechanical ventilation services in Italy, looking after patients either in their own homes or in permanent residential structures through a range of therapeutic and diagnostic services. During the COVID-19 pandemic the company distributed thousands of new liquid oxygen containers across all of its medicinal workshops to meet rising national demand, and set up a crisis committee to guarantee home delivery to over nine hundred of its most vulnerable patients.

The problem is a distribution network with equipment in hundreds of homes across the country, where asset management and inventory movement have to be accurate without exception. Medigas Italia wanted to track and trace the gas cylinders and the other assets that move with them, including trolleys, along the whole distribution network, and to manage returns properly. Each respiratory therapy asset is uniquely identified as it is delivered to a patient, returned to the company’s own facility, and then maintained, inspected and serviced.

The hard part was the metal. A gas cylinder is a conductive, curved steel or aluminium surface, and a plain UHF RFID label stuck straight onto it will usually not read at all. The metal detunes the tag’s antenna, shifting it away from the frequency it was designed for and shorting out the radiating element, so the energy the reader puts into it is absorbed rather than reflected back. The way around it is a mount-on-metal label: a construction that holds the antenna off the surface with a dielectric spacer and uses the metal body itself as a ground plane, so the cylinder becomes part of the aerial instead of killing it. That is the class of tag specified here: Confidex Silverline on-metal labels, with Confidex Ironside Classic passive tags also among the products used. Confidex has supplied short-range wireless products to system integrators and end users for asset management, traceability, authentication and real-time location services since 2005, and is a Beontag company, part of that group’s RFID and IoT enablers arm.

Temperature peaks and durability were the other constraints, since the tags ride on cryogenic equipment and take repeated handling in the field. Mount-on-metal tags go on all models of LOX container, cylinder and cryogenic cylinder in the fleet. LOX is liquid oxygen, held at cryogenic temperature in a vacuum-insulated vessel so a usable volume of gas fits in something a patient can keep at home.

Each Medigas carrier, meaning each delivery driver, is equipped with an iPad Mini tablet, a portable printer and a TSL 1128 UHF RFID reader, with the devices talking to each other over Bluetooth. New on-metal labels are printed and encoded on a Zebra printer, Zebra being one of the long-established makers of industrial label printers with RFID encoding built into the print path, and verified by reading them back with the TSL reader, which feeds an integrated data management system.

The gain comes from mass reading. A barcode has to be presented one item at a time, in line of sight, which on a van load of cylinders means a driver physically handling every single one. A UHF reader interrogates the whole load in one sweep, with the tags in the field answering in turn under the air interface protocol’s anti-collision scheme, so a van is inventoried in seconds without anything being lifted. Verifying and saving the data takes just a few seconds, and the office can see exactly what went onto each vehicle from anywhere, not just from the loading bay.

The reported outcomes follow from that. Serial-number typing errors have been reduced to zero, because the numbers are captured automatically rather than keyed in. Traceability on the conveyance devices is fast and immediate. Documents can be displayed in real time, with the customer able to access the information immediately, and the company reports total compliance with patient therapy along with improved quality of service.

The project was run by IdeaPura, a Swiss consulting boutique specialising in RFID feasibility studies and project management, which designed the processes and took the system live. IdeaPura brought in Cisper Electronics B.V., a Netherlands-based RFID distributor, to supply the hardware side.

The RFID glossary covers on-metal tags and mass reading in more detail, and deployments like this one are collected in our healthcare, asset tracking and UHF sections.

Read more at https://tsl.com/project-profiles/medigas-italia

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Zebra announced the deployment on 30 September 2026. Zebra Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: ZBRA) is a US-headquartered manufacturer of label printers, rugged mobile computers and RFID readers, and one of the larger suppliers of warehouse data capture hardware worldwide. Spex, based in Auckland and part of the Medifab Global Group, builds wheelchair accessories, rehabilitation tools and mobility solutions for people with mobility impairments. That product mix matters to the RFID question, because complex rehab equipment is largely configured to the individual user rather than picked off a shelf in a fixed specification.

The implementation partner was Synergic Technologies, an Auckland integrator that describes itself on its own website as “a certified Zebra Technologies RFID specialist partner in New Zealand”, covering site assessment, RF engineering, middleware configuration and ERP integration.

What Spex deployed

The build uses Zebra MC3300 RFID series mobile computers for picking, ZT400 series industrial printers for the shipping labels, and FX9600 fixed readers to check shipments at a nesting station. Zebra’s MotionWorks enterprise software sits above the hardware, collecting the read events and feeding the ERP system. Workers locate items with the handheld, print the tag at the ZT400, and the fixed reader performs what Zebra describes as a ten second completeness check that updates the ERP automatically.

All of that hardware is UHF RAIN RFID: passive tags with no battery, read over a few metres in the ultra high frequency band, at 865 to 868 MHz in Europe and 902 to 928 MHz in New Zealand and the United States. RAIN RFID is the industry’s working name for the passive UHF ecosystem built on the EPC Gen2 air interface, and it is why this deployment behaves differently from a barcode one. A barcode is a line of sight, one item at a time transaction. A passive UHF tag answers a reader interrogating a whole field, so the unit of work shifts from the item to the order. Terms used here are defined in the RFID glossary.

What the nesting station is actually doing

The ten second check is the most technically interesting element, because it is not a faster barcode scan. A nesting station with a fixed reader and antennas aimed into a defined read zone inventories the entire tag population sitting in that zone, repeatedly, in a single pass. The output is the set of unique tag identifiers present in the field, which the software compares against the expected set for that order. Nothing is handled, nothing is oriented to a scanner, and no one works through a checklist. Verification stops being an act of human attention and becomes a set difference calculated by software, with the read event itself as the evidence. The release makes that point when it says Spex can “verify exactly what was shipped and when”, and that claim does more work than any percentage in the announcement.

The 50 per cent figure, taken apart

Zebra puts the headline gain at “more than 50%” improved picking efficiency. The only evidence offered is a single comparison in the quote from Shaun McDonald, Integrations Engineer at Spex Ltd: “By reducing 15-minute picking tasks to five minutes, Zebra’s RFID solutions have cut our picking times by over 50% while helping us achieve near-perfect dispatch accuracy.”

Those are two different claims in one sentence. Fifteen minutes down to five is a cut of ten minutes, roughly 67 per cent, not 50 per cent. It is also one task rather than an average across a shift, a product range or a site. Saying “over 50%” lets a single best case measurement stand in for a site wide figure while staying technically accurate about it. Both statements can be true at once, and neither tells a reader what the median pick looks like or how many picks resemble the fifteen minute example.

The missing number

“Near-perfect dispatch accuracy” is the phrase to read slowly. It is shaped like a statistic and contains none: no baseline error rate before the deployment, no measured rate after it, and no definition of what counts as an accurate dispatch.

For a medical device manufacturer that omission matters more than it would for a general distributor. The ability to show what was supplied, in what configuration, to whom and when, underpins recall and post market vigilance obligations, so dispatch accuracy there is something a manufacturer may have to evidence to a regulator rather than merely report to its board. The release does describe a real commercial driver: without verifiable proof of dispatch, Zebra says, missing item claims against Spex could trigger automatic and costly product replacements. That is a believable business case. It is not a dispatch accuracy figure.

Brian Van Ginkel, Country Manager for New Zealand at Zebra Technologies, framed the wider argument: “Equipping a connected frontline with RFID technology is essential for modern manufacturers facing growing delivery pressures.” He called the deployment “a powerful example of how real-time inventory visibility empowers workers to modernize operations and deliver reliable service to the customers who depend on their mobility solutions the most.”

Why item level UHF suits assembled to order products

Serialised tagging earns its keep precisely where a barcode struggles, and configured medical equipment is that case. A product code identifies a model. It does not identify the individual unit, the batch its components came from, or the configuration that left the building. Once each unit carries a unique identifier written at manufacture and read at every subsequent touch, movement history becomes a by-product of normal operations rather than a separate clerical task. Zebra says that is what Spex gained: accurate serial and lot histories, faster quality investigations, and the ability to manage recalls and trace items. Comparable deployments are collected under case studies, medical and UHF.

What the release leaves open

What is the tag, and where does it go? On a product assembled to order, with metal frames, foam, fabric and plastics in varying combinations, tag choice and placement are the whole engineering problem. Metal detunes a standard inlay and foam and fabric behave very differently as substrates, so the answer is likely to be a particular inlay or hard tag in a particular position per product family. The release does not say whether tags go on components, on the finished assembly, on the packaging, or some combination.

How does the serial level record map to medical device traceability obligations? Spex is capturing serial and lot history, which is the raw material for unique device identification and recall traceability under the regimes a New Zealand manufacturer exporting internationally has to satisfy. Whether the RFID identifier is tied to a regulatory device identifier, or sits alongside one as an internal record, is not addressed.

And which benefit signed the cheque? The announcement leads with picking speed, but the capabilities described last, meaning recall readiness, serial history and defensible proof of dispatch, are the ones that are hard to achieve any other way. A ten minute saving on a pick is easy to put in a business case. It is also the benefit a manufacturer in a regulated sector is least likely to have built the project around.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The RAIN Alliance is the global industry association for RAIN RFID, the battery-free UHF RFID technology that works in the 860 MHz to 960 MHz band and lets one reader identify hundreds of individually serialised items per second without line of sight. (The RFID glossary covers the terminology used here.) Ryan, who announced on the same day that she would be stepping down from the president and chief executive role, used the keynote to argue for treating RAIN RFID as plumbing rather than as a product.

“What I’m trying to represent on this slide is the concept of the RAIN technology infrastructure as a trusted item-level data platform. Get the data out, and everything else is potentially almost straightforward.”

“We defend the infrastructure”

The harder-edged part of the keynote was about who protects the conditions the technology depends on. Ryan put the Alliance’s membership at “over 200 member companies all around the world”, and framed that number as a negotiating position rather than a marketing statistic.

“If a small number of small companies went to a regulator to discuss a spectrum issue, the likelihood of them being listened to is pretty small. But if two hundred member companies, large and small, can go together and speak with one clear voice, now we have the opportunity to be heard.”

The same gap applies when policymakers write law without knowing the technology exists. “They probably don’t know anything about this technology. They probably don’t know that this technology can help them, either in the implementation of the law or in testing compliance against it.” Her summary of the job was blunt: “We defend the infrastructure. The standards, the spectrum, the regulatory environment. And that’s what enables this community to make the impact.” Then an admission you rarely hear from a stage: that this work “is costly and time-consuming”, that a large share of membership fees goes on it every year, and that “in my opinion, we need to be spending more”. For a live example of why spectrum defence is not an abstraction, see our explainer on what NextNav’s 900 MHz plan would mean for RAIN RFID worldwide.

Eight awards, six collected in person

Ryan called the awards “my favourite part of the whole event”. Eight were presented, six collected on stage. The lifetime achievement award went to Decathlon’s RFID and traceability leader, Herve d’Halluin, who Ryan said “has led probably the single biggest retail deployment on the planet” and who has also served several years on the Alliance’s board of directors. Decathlon has applied a RAIN tag to every product it sells since 2019. His acceptance speech was about collective action rather than technology.

“Some of you guys are individuals and some are producers, but within this group, we manage to find some commonalities. And when we decide to do something, we go there and we go there together, and that’s where we get some success.”

The other awards recognised work that is almost invisible from outside the Alliance: representation to the European Commission on digital product passports, chairing the Asia Pacific advisory council, government affairs and spectrum defence, the RAIN Communication Interface simulator and the push to get RAIN support into smartphone operating systems, and encoding. On that last one, Ryan made the point that matters most to anyone starting a deployment: “If you get the encoding wrong, everything else is wrong too.”

Tageos: 42.7 billion tags, and 0.5 per cent of the opportunity

Matthieu Picon, co-founder and chief executive of Tageos, took the “next 100 billion tags” slot. Tageos is a French RFID inlay and label manufacturer based in Montpellier, with plants in Asia and the United States, best known for paper-based constructions that strip plastic and adhesive out of the tag. It ships to 49 countries and sells only through partners.

Picon was unusually honest about a flat year. RAIN Alliance members shipped 42.7 billion UHF tag chips in 2025, short of expectations, which he put down to “very challenging international and commercial tensions”; he expects 2026 to recover “in the range of fifty billion”. Set against that, his estimate of the headroom was the figure worth writing down.

“We estimate only 0.5 per cent of RAIN potentially connected items are today connected.”

Four forces will close that gap, he said: regulation, with digital product passports and food traceability rules both demanding “accessible and trustworthy product information”; the economics of visibility; automation, because “labour costs are increasing” while “workforce availability is decreasing”; and customer experience, from self-checkout to product authentication. The AI argument was the one he pressed hardest, and it was a warning rather than a pitch.

“We need to understand where the items are, when they move, real-time data. Otherwise it will just be guessing, and the outcome will be certainly disappointing. So AI will have to rely on the physical layers we are providing.”

Inditex: from a price tag that kept falling off to 5,000 readers at the door

Ivan Escudero, head of RFID at Inditex, gave the deployment history. Inditex is the Spanish fashion group behind Zara, Massimo Dutti and Bershka, and has run RAIN RFID at item level for well over a decade. He opened on the business problem, not the technology: Inditex shop floors carry deliberately low quantities, often “one per size”, with the bulk of inventory in a stockroom next door. “The combination with the high traffic that we are having in the store is difficult to manage. So it is a very challenging environment that we need to solve with some technology.”

The first attempt put the tag in the price ticket. “We felt uncomfortable having it there because it was falling a lot and was not so accurate,” Escudero said. Inditex moved to a reusable hard tag instead, encoded per article in the distribution centre through RFID tunnels, with the algorithms written in house; he thanked Sensormatic and Checkpoint for their part in that. What followed in store was stocktake that is “very quick and very accurate”, replenishment driven off the sales floor, size availability checked while the customer waits, and a tool he described as “like WhatsApp, giving a message to someone in the stockroom to take the garment and give it to the customer”. Flagships of more than 4,000 square metres, laid out by ambiance rather than category, have pushed Inditex into locating articles automatically using fixed anchors.

The headline figure concerned loss prevention. Inditex has spent years trying to retire the detachable hard tag, which slows the till in stores seeing “more than 10,000 people a day”, in favour of RAIN tags built into the garment and readers at the entrance. Early trials went badly, with readers interfering with each other, “but now we have installed more than 5,000 RFID readers in all our stores at the entrance, and we are using RFID technology for anti-theft”. Because the system knows which item walked out, the alarm is informative rather than merely loud: stock is adjusted the moment it fires, and if sales do not subsequently appear against that item, “we assume that this was a theft”, with an app showing each store the value lost.

Escudero listed five requirements the replacement had to meet. It must not constrain the garment’s design, it must cost roughly what a hard tag costs, it must be quick to reactivate, it must be secure enough for detection, and it must be as durable as the tag it replaces. The answer was to stop treating the tag as one thing in one place: “Some garments have one, some garments have two. There is one in the brand label, another in the colour label. There is in every part of the garment.” He credited Avery Dennison with that development work and said implementation is complete across four of the group’s brands. The result he cared about was simpler than any of it: “we are very comfortable having no queues in the store”.

Closing the loop: what recycling actually needs from a tag

The session closed with a panel, “Closing the Loop: RAIN in Action Across Retail, Recycling and the Green Transition”, moderated by Dr Susanne Guth-Orlowski, the RAIN Alliance’s digital product passport specialist. A digital product passport is the EU requirement that a product carry a data carrier linking to structured information about what it contains, where it came from and how it should be handled at end of life; we have covered what the EU DPP Registry rules mean for RFID separately.

Dan McGrath, JD Group head of customer operations at JD Sports, the UK-headquartered sports fashion retailer, described a rollout measured in months: “It’s been a 14-month journey for us, and we’ve had a massive acceleration programme in terms of global adoption of RFID.” JD took 1,000 directly managed stores live in that window, and 2,700 across the wider group, work the retailer has since described as the end of phase one. What the data is for reaches past stock accuracy: “it’s very much about the transfer of ownership of that product from a factory to a brand, to also the retailer, but then also to the end consumer”. That chain of custody feeds ESG reporting, resale and authentication in a market where “there are a lot of fake goods”.

Hans Petter Hübert, director of strategic initiatives at Kezzler, the Norwegian traceability software company running digital product passport pilots inside the EU’s CIRPASS-2 project, made the carrier argument plainly. Kezzler is carrier agnostic as a data management provider, but “if you look at the core of the DPP requirement, it’s really to embed products with a data carrier. We want to follow the product from creation to end of life. And there’s only one technology that can support that at scale today.” The bottleneck, he added, is not the radio: “It is a data management challenge. And no matter what sector you’re in, you will have data scattered around in various systems and in various companies.” Tags that survive a garment’s whole life without contaminating the recycling stream already exist and are “probably too costly for many”, but the extra cost “at some point in the future will be worth it”.

The most useful contribution came from Gabriel Gomez, technical advisor at EuRIC, the European Recycling Industries’ Confederation, where he leads the mechanical tyre recycling branch. Recyclers have no stake in which technology wins; they care about throughput and contamination.

“For the case of tyres, we are very hopeful for RFID, in the sense that it is a solution that shows itself. Also, it’s not entirely geometry dependent, which is another one of the requirements. We’re talking about people who are handling thousands of articles per minute.”

His statement of the industry’s core problem was the clearest expression of the circularity case anyone made all morning: “The breaking point for the tyre recycling industry, and generally for the recycling industry and for the waste management industry, is really to know, once something enters the waste stream, what to do with it, and that comes with better sorting. If we have a tag that says this sort of thing, this and that, I can decide, I am going to put it this or there.” On the data volume that implies, he was blunt: “The amount of data that we are going to be generating is not something that we can handle manually. We’re going to need some support, some artificial support.”

Pressed on what “does not disturb the process” means in practice, Gomez was concrete. Quality thresholds differ by waste stream, so “I can give you 20 different answers”, but today a tag is harmless because “we just shred it”; the risk arrives when a recyclate has to meet a specification and the tag has pushed its metal content up. He also reported learning at the previous day’s tyre workshop, “less than 24 hours ago”, that tags can carry temperature and pressure sensing. Recycling plants lose time and material to fires started by batteries in the waste stream, and active sensing of those parameters “would be a game changer”. Guth-Orlowski took that as the argument for the event itself, noting how often a supply chain this large only discovers such things by sitting in the same room.

Ten cents, and a wash standard that does not exist yet

Asked what new requirements end users will place on RAIN tags, McGrath went straight at durability and price. It “comes down to cost”: “Woven into a care label, or we’re going to heat seal for a trainer, you’re probably looking at around 10 cents a tag, and you then, as a CFO of the brand, factor that into the amount of product that you produce every year.” Durability, when Guth-Orlowski asked him to define it, turned out to mean something the industry does not currently specify at all.

“We have care labels on the product that says 40 degrees or hand wash. But if you then got a tag as part of that care label, does that tag standard actually cover that? How many times can I wash it before the tag degrades and can’t be read anymore? As a brand, you need to make a decision on not just a tag standard, but a wear standard for that tag.”

His concern was not the first purchase but the next one. Brands “are going to spend a significant amount of money, that needs to be the right decision for a good few years. Not, oh, we’ve got this new tag standard now, and this new tag standard, then it’s this forever perpetual cycle of replacing tags.” A tag expected to live in a product for that product’s whole life, feed a digital product passport and still read correctly on a sorting line is a materially different specification from one that only has to survive a season on a shop floor. Nobody on the stage claimed it exists today. More from the sector in our retail RFID coverage and on the RAIN in Action summit page.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The RAIN Alliance is the industry body behind RAIN RFID, the battery-free UHF technology built on the GS1 EPC UHF Gen2 air interface, standardised as ISO/IEC 18000-63 and operating in the 860 to 960 MHz band. It sets the market’s common language, pushes for regulatory alignment across regions and acts as the collective voice of tag, reader and software vendors along with the retailers, logistics operators and healthcare providers deploying them.

The timing is what makes this more than a routine leadership note. RAIN in Action 2026 runs from 29 September to 1 October 2026 in Madrid under the theme “From Infrastructure to Impact”, with speakers from Amazon, UPS, IKEA, H&M, Decathlon, Primark, JD Sports and Texas Children’s Hospital on the programme. Delegates who watched Ryan open proceedings from the stage learned within hours that she was leaving the organisation she has run since October 2022.

Four years of growth

Ryan joined the RAIN Alliance in October 2022 with a stated aim of harmonising the RAIN ecosystem, supporting a new phase of growth and establishing the Alliance as the dominant voice in the market. On the Alliance’s own figures, membership doubled over those four years and RAIN tag IC shipments grew by around 50% a year across the same period, which is the closest thing the sector has to a headline volume metric.

RAIN in Action itself is part of that record. The event launched in 2024, sold out in Amsterdam in 2025 and drew more than 500 delegates to Madrid in 2026, making it the largest regular gathering of the RAIN ecosystem.

Two technical milestones also landed during her tenure. RAIN RFID was recognised as a Digital Product Passport data carrier by CEN/CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24, the European standards committee drafting the horizontal rules for the Digital Product Passport under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. That recognition matters commercially, because it puts a passive UHF tag alongside QR codes and NFC as a compliant way of carrying a product’s passport identifier. Separately, the first RAIN-enabled smartphones reached the market, which is the long-awaited step towards consumers, rather than only staff with handheld readers, being able to interrogate a UHF tag.

What was said

“RAIN technology plays a critical role in enabling a smarter, more sustainable and connected world,” said Aileen Ryan, President and CEO at the RAIN Alliance. “It has been an honour to collaborate with RAIN Alliance members, regulators, legislative bodies and fellow standards groups to help industries better understand how they can harness RAIN deployments to improve traceability, operational efficiency and sustainability. I’m also incredibly proud to have established the RAIN Alliance as a trusted source and credible voice – one that is listened to and has a seat at the table where key industry decisions are made.”

“On behalf of the RAIN Alliance Board, I would like to thank Aileen for her contribution to the Alliance and the industry over the last four years,” said Jos Kunnen, Chair of the RAIN Alliance Board of Directors. “She has played a pivotal role in steering the RAIN ecosystem through its next phase of evolution and amplifying awareness of RAIN as an essential technology. We wish her every success for the future and thank her for her leadership.”

What happens next

The Alliance said its Board is focused on ensuring a smooth transition, has begun the process of determining the organisation’s future leadership and will provide further updates in due course. No successor was named in the 30 September 2026 announcement, no reason was given for the departure and no onward destination was indicated.

Ryan remains in post until 30 November 2026, so the Alliance has two months of overlap before the seat is empty. The open questions for members are whether the next chief executive comes from inside the RAIN vendor base or from the wider standards world, and whether the regulatory work on Digital Product Passports keeps its current pace through the handover. That second point is the one with a deadline attached, since the European rules the Alliance has been positioning RAIN against are still being drafted.

RFID News will publish a full write-up of Aileen Ryan’s RAIN in Action keynote on the evening of 30 September 2026.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Store counts are the easy part of this story to report and the least interesting part of it. The number that matters sits in the middle of McGrath’s post, and it is the one JD had no power to instruct: over the same fourteen months to September 2026, source tagging across JD’s brand partners rose from around 40% of product to 73%.

The number JD could not mandate

Source tagging means the RFID label or hang tag is applied at the point of manufacture, by the supplier, rather than being stuck on later by the retailer in a distribution centre or a stockroom. For a retailer of JD’s shape it is the only version of item-level tagging that scales. JD is a multi-brand retailer: the shelves carry other companies’ products, made in other companies’ factories, under other companies’ tagging policies. A retailer can buy readers, write software and train staff entirely on its own authority. It cannot order a global sportswear brand to add an inlay to a garment tag at source.

So moving that figure from roughly 40% to 73% was a supply-chain persuasion exercise rather than a technology project, and it is the part of the programme least likely to be repeatable by anyone who assumes the hard bit is the hardware. McGrath’s own framing is that the work was about “changing behaviours, processes and mindsets” rather than “scanners, tags and technology”, and he credits the shift to brand partners increasingly recognising what RFID offers in their own retail formats and supply chains, not to pressure from JD.

That 27% gap is not a rounding error either. It is the ceiling on everything else the programme is being built towards. A store cannot behave as a reliable real-time inventory node if roughly a quarter of the units on its shelves carry no tag at all, because the untagged quarter is invisible to every count, every availability check and every downstream system that consumes the data. Read rates on passive UHF RAIN RFID in apparel and footwear are high enough that the tagged population can be trusted; the untagged population cannot be inferred.

What was actually deployed

The platform underneath the programme is ItemOptix, the RFID inventory management software from Checkpoint Systems, a supplier of retail loss prevention and RFID systems. JD signed a multi-year global software agreement covering its Sports Fashion Group stores, beginning in Europe. Notably, JD’s own IT team integrated the RFID processes into JD’s existing store software using Checkpoint’s ItemOptix SDK, rather than handing colleagues a separate application to learn beside the till system they already used. For a rollout measured in stores per week, that decision matters more than it sounds: it removes an entire category of training and change resistance.

Two other suppliers sit either side of the software, and neither has been named in the coverage of this milestone. Zebra Technologies, the enterprise mobile computing firm whose handheld computers are the default in warehouse and retail scanning, supplied the handheld RFID readers. Renovotec, a UK rugged hardware and mobility integrator, acted as the UK deployment and support partner. Between them they cover the two jobs that quietly sink RFID rollouts, which are getting working hardware into a thousand buildings and keeping it working afterwards.

In the distribution network, JD runs fixed tunnel readers, which are RFID portals mounted over a conveyor that read every tag in a carton as it passes through without anyone handling the goods. The Rochdale site near Manchester in the UK went in first, followed by Heerlen in the Netherlands serving continental Europe, with a stated throughput of up to 540,000 items per hour.

The results that justified all of it came from a deliberately small pilot: five stores in the UK, France and Spain in the second half of 2024, which returned a 12% increase in on-shelf availability, a 20% improvement in restocking speed and a 95% increase in items found. From that proof of concept to a full enterprise rollout took 76 working days, McGrath told Retail Technology Innovation Hub in January 2026. The UK and Ireland leg alone was 414 stores in 16 weeks, a pace of 25 stores a week, supported by a week-long immersive change and culture programme that trained 26 retail Change Champions.

Phase One complete is not rollout complete

It is worth being precise about what has finished, because the headline figures invite a bigger reading than they support. The 1,000 stores are the ones JD directly launched, which in McGrath’s wording covers “everything we directly control”. The wider group number he gives, 2,700 live of 4,800, leaves roughly 2,100 stores outside the programme, largely franchise and brand-partner estates where JD’s operating control is limited or indirect. Reaching 2,700 stores in fourteen months across that many territories is a genuinely large piece of work by any retail standard. It is also, by JD’s own accounting, a bit over half of the group.

Confidence rather than accuracy

What makes the source-tagging figure strategically loaded rather than merely operational is where McGrath says the programme is heading. In a May 2026 Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview he opened with “I hate RFID. Not because it doesn’t work. Not because it isn’t valuable. But because most of the industry is still looking at it through the wrong lens”. His objection is to the measure the sector reports. “Accuracy is a report. Confidence is a decision,” he said, and “what’s the point in being 98% accurate, if an agent can’t trust that last 2%?”

The destination he describes is machine-readable inventory. “Stores stop being places with stock and start becoming real-time, queryable inventory nodes,” he said, and “We’re building infrastructure for machines to trade physical goods.” His summary of the shift is blunt: “RFID isn’t a store ops tool anymore. It’s a confidence engine for agentic commerce”. He also noted that he chose Checkpoint Systems and ItemOptix specifically because it is “a fully serviceable, API first RFID platform”, which is a coherent choice if the long-term consumer of the data is software rather than a store manager.

He is dismissive of where the rest of the sector has its attention: “The industry is still talking about cycle counts”. The uncomfortable implication for anyone agreeing with him is that the agentic-commerce case rests entirely on tag coverage. An API-first platform, tunnel readers at 540,000 items an hour and 2,700 live stores are all necessary and none of them are sufficient while 27% of product arrives untagged.

The question left open

Which brand partners moved, and what moved them, is the part of this programme nobody has published. A jump from roughly 40% to 73% of product in fourteen months implies specific commercial conversations with specific suppliers, and the arguments that worked in those rooms are considerably more valuable to the rest of retail than another set of store counts. The same goes for the remaining 27%. Whether that tail closes through supplier economics, through JD tagging at its own distribution centres as a stopgap, or not at all, is the thing to watch in Phase Two.

Read more at https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7510307314281844736/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Cisper, the Netherlands-based RFID distributor that supplies readers, antennas and tags to customers across Europe and India, spent day one of RAIN in Action handing out branded socks. I have agreed to wear mine on Wednesday 30 September. So if you are in Madrid this week and you spot a pair of unusually trendy socks coming towards you, that will be me. Come and say hello.

RAIN in Action is the annual conference of the RAIN Alliance, the industry body behind UHF RFID built on the Gen2 air interface, and it is running at the Novotel Madrid City Centre from 29 September to 1 October 2026. Day one opened with a networking session, which did exactly what it was supposed to do. It is genuinely good to put faces to a year of email, and there were a lot of them.

Why the world needs RAIN enabled smartphones

The first session I sat in was led by Paul Muller, who leads RAIN Reader Smartphone Integration at the RAIN Alliance, with Steyn Geldenhuys, CTO of Sieveo, and Zoe Venter, product designer at the same company. Sieveo is a German systems integrator in the Utsch group, better known for RAIN RFID in vehicle identification and for DigSig, an approach that lets a tag be verified offline.

The premise was a good one, and it is the most persuasive framing of this argument I have heard.

An online retailer knows almost everything about a visit. Where the customer came from, what they looked at, how long they lingered, which part of the screen their attention went to, the whole path through the site. A physical shop, which is still where most retail happens, knows almost none of it. You know what went through the till. Everything before that is guesswork.

The proposition is that a phone which can read UHF tags closes that gap, and brings customer engagement, loyalty and Digital Product Passports along with it. Put that capability in the customer’s pocket and the shop floor starts producing the kind of data the website has had for twenty years.

I like the argument, these are the types of jobs I have worked on with one of my companies for customer engagement.

The NFC problem

The presentation stated that RFID is not currently enabled in phones. That is not right, and the distinction matters.

Practically every smartphone shipped today contains an RFID reader. It is called NFC, it runs at 13.56 MHz, and it is high frequency RFID. It is how contactless payment works, how a hotel key card works, and how a great many product authentication and engagement campaigns already work. The reader is in the pocket of almost every customer in the shop, right now.

What phones do not have is UHF, the 860 to 960 MHz band that RAIN uses. So the honest version of the claim is not that phones cannot read RFID. It is that phones cannot read this RFID.

Which leaves the real question: what does UHF give you that NFC does not?

There is a decent answer available. Range, for one, since NFC is a touch and UHF is a metre or so. Reading many tags at once rather than one at a time. And the strongest argument by some distance, which is that the UHF tag is already in the garment. It was put there for the supply chain, it survived to the shop floor, and it is the same tag the retailer already paid for. An NFC engagement campaign needs a second tag added for the purpose. A RAIN one does not.

That is the case, and I would have liked to hear it made.

The privacy question, which is not going away

The room raised privacy, and it was the sharpest exchange of the session.

If a phone can read the tags on a person, it can read the tags on a person. Consider a handbag. If a four thousand pound designer bag carries a tag that identifies what it is, then somebody walking behind the owner with the right phone learns that the bag is worth stealing. The tag turns a judgement call into a lookup.

Extend it and it gets less comfortable rather than more. Everything somebody is wearing, read at a metre, by anybody, without their knowledge.

This is a solvable problem. There is real work in the standards on what a tag discloses to an unauthorised reader, and tags can be killed or short-ranged at the point of sale. But it has to be solved before consumer phones ship with UHF readers, not afterwards, and an industry that puts the reader in a billion pockets without answering it first will have the answer written for it by somebody else.

Two practical things

The stated read distance was around one metre. In my experience any quoted read distance should be taken with a pinch of salt. Range on a real deployment depends on the tag, the material behind it, what else is in the room and how much of the customer’s hand is wrapped around the phone. A metre in a demonstration is not a metre in a Tuesday afternoon shop.

Nobody asked about battery. A UHF reader is an active transmitter, and phone makers count milliamps like misers. If putting a RAIN reader in a handset costs meaningful battery life, that is a conversation with Apple and Samsung rather than with our industry, and it is the sort of thing that decides whether any of this ships.

RAIN sensing

The other session worth reporting was the Sensors Working Group, led by Sara Amendola, CEO of Radio6ense, who leads that group for the RAIN Alliance. It was run as an open discussion rather than a formal working group meeting, which was the right decision.

The subject is what happens when a tag reports a condition as well as an identity. Temperature, moisture, strain, whatever the application needs, added to the identification that RAIN already provides. The session covered where the working group has got to, then handed over to members for use cases across healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and retail, and opened up into a discussion of where the market actually needs this, what is blocking adoption, and which applications are worth chasing next.

The invitation was explicit: the group wants new participants and new use cases, and it is looking for cross-collaboration with the other RAIN Alliance working groups. If sensing is relevant to what you build, that is a door being held open.

More tomorrow

A good first day. The smartphones session will stay with me, partly because I disagree with a piece of how it was framed and partly because the underlying argument deserves a better hearing than it got.

We are reporting from Madrid all week. Come and find me and we can talk, and if you cannot spot me, look for the socks.

Every RFID conference, showcase and trade show we know about is listed in the RFID News events calendar.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

RAIN in Action 2026 opened this morning in Madrid, bringing retailers, brands, integrators and chipmakers together for three days of presentations, live demonstrations and workshops. It arrives at an unusual moment for the RAIN RFID industry: the first year-on-year fall in chip shipments it has had to explain.

The RAIN Alliance’s latest figures show 42.7 billion RAIN tag chips shipped in 2025, down from a record 52.8 billion in 2024.

A blip, says the Alliance

Ahead of the summit, rfidnews.co.uk put six questions to Aileen Ryan, CEO of the RAIN Alliance. Her assessment is that the decline is a blip, driven by semiconductor inventory cycles, tariffs and retail destocking, and that it should be read against roughly 50% growth over the past four years.

That view is broadly supported by the industry’s longer-term trajectory. The question now is whether the next wave of adoption arrives quickly enough to keep a blip from becoming a trend. Three themes from the interview are likely to decide it.

Grocery

Grocery has long been tipped as RAIN’s next big vertical, and the fit is genuine: traceability, waste reduction and food safety, with the US FDA’s FSMA 204 traceability rule adding regulatory pressure. But grocery will only follow the path apparel took if the whole chain commits. Suppliers, manufacturers, logistics operators and retailers all need to tag. A single retailer acting alone is a pilot, not a market.

Regulation versus ROI

Ryan is clear that the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a catalyst for adoption, not a substitute for return on investment. Organisations that deploy RFID purely for compliance have bought a cost. Those that layer use cases, starting with stock accuracy and loss prevention and adding DPP on top, have bought a return, with compliance included.

RAIN-enabled smartphones

The arrival of RAIN readers in smartphones could change who the end reader actually is. When every shopper carries a reader, tag encoding, tag quality and power levels stop being engineering details and become matters of consumer trust. Getting them wrong at scale risks damaging that trust in a way that would be difficult to repair.

Why Madrid matters

The value of an event like RAIN in Action lies in the cross-sector conversations it makes possible. This year ECR Retail Loss is running its RFID in Retail Innovation Summit alongside the main programme, putting retail loss prevention specialists in the same building as the technology supply chain. These are the conversations in which the next wave of adoption either gets organised or does not.

The figure to watch when 2026 shipment data is published: whether RAIN chip volumes return above 52.8 billion.

rfidnews.co.uk is reporting from RAIN in Action throughout the week. Readers attending the event are welcome to get in touch.

Every RFID conference, showcase and trade show we know about is listed in the RFID News events calendar.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Taken separately these are two vendor announcements timed for RAIN in Action in Madrid, which opens on Tuesday. Taken together they say something more specific: the reader is leaving the dedicated reader.

Gen2X is Impinj’s extension to the Gen2 air interface protocol, which the company describes as standards-compatible and has licensed out to the wider RAIN industry rather than keeping to its own hardware. Zebra was the first licensee. What is new today is the scope, because extending it across handhelds, sleds and fixed readers in one move makes Gen2X the default behaviour of a very large installed base rather than a feature on a flagship.

The performance claims are worth reading closely. Impinj says Gen2X speeds up re-inventorying of a specific tag by up to 100%, which is the mechanism behind finding one item on a rail rather than counting a room. For range, it cites tests by inlay maker Xindeco in which VersaMini tags sitting 3mm from a large metal surface read at over 1.5 metres, more than 50% better than the same tags without Gen2X, and a shelf test across roughly 800 health and beauty products where the number of items inventoried in ten seconds at two metres rose by over 70%.

Those are the numbers that matter for the categories RFID has historically struggled with: small items, dense shelves, liquids and metal. They are also, and this is the part the announcement does not dwell on, vendor-run tests of an Impinj protocol extension using tags from an Impinj partner. Gen2X is not free performance that arrives with a firmware update alone. The gains need Gen2X at both ends, on the reader and on the tag, so a retailer running older inventory will see the reader upgrade and not much else until the tags turn over too. That is a procurement question rather than a technical objection, but it is the question a buyer should ask first.

On the mobile side, the device list is the story. The AMobile Ruby 8 tablet, Bluebird X40, Chainway MC51, Unitech PA768e, UROVO DT610, DT630 and UPad, and Zebra TC501 and TC701 are not a single vendor’s roadmap, they are six manufacturers arriving at the same form factor at once. Behind them sit Qualcomm and MediaTek, and the step that makes the rest possible is Qualcomm’s Dragonwing Q-6690, the first enterprise mobile processor to pull the RAIN reader onto the system on chip itself. We covered what that means in practice when Chainway announced the MC80: no separate reader module, no extra board area, and a device thin enough that people will actually carry it.

That is the shift underneath both announcements. A dedicated handheld reader is a tool an employee picks up to do a task called stocktaking. A smartphone-sized device that happens to read RAIN tags is something they carry all day, which is what makes Impinj’s second use case, continuous passive inventory gathered while staff restock and serve customers, plausible rather than aspirational. It is also why the range figures matter more than the read rate: a device in a pocket does not get pointed at anything.

What neither announcement gives is pricing, and Zebra has not said which firmware versions carry Gen2X on which models or whether any device needs a paid licence to enable it. For anyone running a Zebra estate, that is the practical question, and it is worth asking before Madrid rather than after. Impinj and Zebra are demonstrating Gen2X on Zebra handhelds at the show this week.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

If you are reading this outside the United States, the natural response is that an American docket is an American problem. That response is wrong, and the reason comes down to four frequencies written into a European standard.

What is actually being proposed

NextNav is a US company that holds Multilateration Location and Monitoring Service licences in the 900 MHz band and sells terrestrial positioning, navigation and timing services. In April 2024 it petitioned the Federal Communications Commission, the US telecoms regulator, to reconfigure the band around a nationwide 5G network that would serve as a terrestrial complement to GPS.

The shape of the proposal is simple enough to state. A 5 MHz uplink at 902 to 907 MHz. A 10 MHz downlink at 918 to 928 MHz. Everything else that uses the band today compressed into the 11 MHz that remains at 907 to 918 MHz. NextNav would exchange its existing licences for a single nationwide 15 MHz flexible-use licence.

Today that band is unlicensed and shared under Part 15 of the FCC’s rules. RAIN RFID readers sit in it, and so do LoRaWAN and Wi-SUN networks, Z-Wave home devices, electricity and gas meters, road tolling systems, alarm and security equipment, and amateur radio operators on a secondary basis. None of them holds a licence and none of them has priority over the others. Twenty-six megahertz of shared spectrum would become eleven.

The matter sits before the FCC under dockets RM-11989, WT 24-240 and WT 25-110.

Why this reaches well past America

Europe runs UHF RFID in two bands. The long-established lower band at 865 to 868 MHz, and an upper band at 915 to 921 MHz that European countries opened more recently.

The upper band is defined in ETSI EN 302 208, the European standard for RFID equipment in these frequencies. It specifies four high power interrogator channels, each 400 kHz wide, at 916.3, 917.5, 918.7 and 919.9 MHz, with power up to 4 W ERP.

Two of those four channels, 918.7 and 919.9 MHz, fall inside the 918 to 928 MHz slice NextNav proposes to hold exclusively in the United States.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean, because the point is easily overstated. NextNav’s petition is a United States matter and reaches no further. European spectrum is set by CEPT and national regulators, and nothing in this proceeding touches it. A reader operating on 918.7 MHz in Rotterdam or Rochdale would carry on exactly as before. The risk is not that anyone takes European frequencies away. It is divergence: the prospect of the top third of the American band behaving in a fundamentally different way from the same frequencies everywhere else.

Europe did not arrive at that band by accident. It took years of technical study by CEPT, the body through which European administrations coordinate spectrum, and it was given effect by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2018/1538, which applied from 1 February 2019. The stated purpose was harmonisation with North America.

The RAIN Alliance calls 915 to 921 MHz the global overlap zone and makes the commercial case plainly: a system designed for it can be manufactured once and deployed across most of the world without retesting, recertification or hardware redesign. The Alliance also credits the upper band with up to 40% more read range and roughly double the communication speed compared with the European lower band. More than 25 European countries have made it available. Decathlon, the French sporting goods retailer and a speaker at the Madrid conference, has committed to deploying it across thousands of stores.

Nor is this only a European question. Japan runs 916 to 921 MHz, South Korea 917 to 923.5 MHz, China 920 to 925 MHz, Australia 918 to 926 MHz, and Brazil 902 to 907.5 MHz together with 915 to 928 MHz. One industry survey found that 55 of the 81 countries whose status was known offered RAIN reader channels somewhere within 902 to 928 MHz.

The slice at issue is therefore not a quiet corner of an American band. It is the part of the radio spectrum the rest of the world has spent the better part of fifteen years converging on.

The arithmetic that decides what happens to readers

The detail that matters most to anyone running RFID has had very little attention, and it is a question of channel counting.

Under 47 CFR 15.247, the FCC rule that governs frequency hopping in this band, a system in 902 to 928 MHz may transmit at 1 W only if it hops across at least 50 channels. A system using fewer than 50 but at least 25 channels is held to 0.25 W. Below 25 channels there is no allowance at all under that rule. US readers today typically hop across 50 channels spaced 500 kHz apart, which the full 26 MHz comfortably supports.

Compress the shared allocation to 11 MHz and that stops working. At 500 kHz spacing, 11 MHz yields 22 channels, which is below even the 25 channel floor. Keeping 50 channels inside 11 MHz means bringing channel spacing down to roughly 220 kHz, and with it the bandwidth of each hopping channel.

That is not a firmware update. Narrower channels mean lower data rates, which means slower reads, and slower reads bite hardest in dense deployments with many readers and many tags in close proximity, which is precisely where RFID is already most difficult. Equipment designed and certified around 500 kHz channels does not simply move. Neither NextNav nor the opposing coalition has set out what would happen to the installed base, and it is the question every operator should be asking.

The case NextNav makes

The starting point of NextNav’s argument is not in serious dispute. GPS is a weak signal from a long way away, it can be jammed and spoofed, and a great deal of modern infrastructure depends on it for timing as much as for position. Building a terrestrial layer beneath it is a legitimate goal, and the company frames its proposal as a system-of-systems approach rather than a replacement.

NextNav argues that its plan achieves this through the market rather than through public spending, at no cost to taxpayers. It commissioned the Brattle Group, an economic consultancy, which put the value of a terrestrial GPS backup at $14.6bn and assessed the cost to unlicensed devices as close to zero. The company has said it would take financial responsibility for coexistence testing with affected licensed users such as railways and tolling operators.

On RFID specifically, NextNav has not simply asserted that coexistence works. In May 2026 it ran a rooftop demonstration in San Jose, California, involving live RFID equipment, with RKF Engineering Solutions concurring on the methodology. Its broader position on unlicensed users is one that deserves to be stated fairly: Part 15 devices are built to tolerate interference and to share, they enjoy no protection today, and the band has never been anyone’s private property.

The case against

The objections fall into two groups, and they are not equally strong.

The economic case is the noisier one and the harder to pin down. The SpecTech Alliance puts the cost to American business at up to $7bn. The Edison Electric Institute, which represents US investor-owned electricity companies, has estimated up to $4bn for each utility spread across a ten to fifteen year replacement cycle, and utility interests collectively have put the figure at $100bn or more. Device makers including Itron, Landis+Gyr and ecobee have said that replacing just 10% of affected equipment would cost around $10bn.

These numbers range across more than an order of magnitude, and every one of them, including NextNav’s, was produced by a party with a direct commercial interest in the outcome. They should be read as advocacy rather than as measurement.

The technical case is stronger because it is checkable. The Security Industry Association has filed an interference impact study. The RAIN Alliance’s concern is the one set out above: the band is the foundation of a global supply chain in retail, healthcare, logistics and manufacturing, and the proposal lands on the part of it that the world has standardised around. More than 2,000 comments have been filed in the proceeding, and opposition in the record is close to unanimous.

The same problem, answered a different way

Here is the part of this story that is genuinely useful to a reader outside the United States, because Europe faces the same threat in a sharper form and has reached a different answer.

Since 2022, sustained GNSS jamming and spoofing has been recorded across the Baltic Sea region, attributed by the affected states to sources in Russia and Belarus. Thirteen EU member states have formally demanded action. Nobody in Europe needs persuading that satellite navigation is fragile.

Europe’s response has been layered rather than structural. Authentication built into Galileo, the EU’s satellite navigation system, so that receivers can detect spoofed signals. Encrypted signals for government users. An interference detection and localisation service. Celeste, a European Space Agency demonstrator testing positioning from low Earth orbit, where signals arrive stronger. Mitigation at the receiver itself. ENTSO-E, the association of European electricity transmission operators, has been drafting a PNT resilience standard for the power sector.

Nor, as it happens, does NextNav’s own international business depend on doing so. Its TerraPoiNT positioning network operates on 855 to 860 MHz in Japan rather than at 900 MHz, and NextNav France, the arm built on its 2022 acquisition of the French positioning company Nestwave, has been developing the system to work from LTE and 5G signals. The company therefore already runs on different spectrum in different jurisdictions, and outside the United States its stated direction is to use the mobile bands that exist rather than to seek a band of its own. That does not invalidate the American petition, and there are real differences between the markets. But it does complicate the argument that this particular reconfiguration is the necessary route to resilient positioning.

What Europe has not done is reallocate a shared band to a single licensed operator. That is an observation rather than a verdict, and the two jurisdictions are not obliged to agree. But it does reframe the question. If the case for NextNav’s plan rests on the fragility of GPS, it is worth noting that the region with the most acute GNSS interference problem in the world has concluded that the answer lies in better signals, better receivers and orbital diversity, not in clearing spectrum.

Where it stands

Despite the weight of opposition in the record, the proposal is advancing. In March 2026 the FCC sent a draft Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to the White House Office of Management and Budget for interagency review, a step that precedes a formal rulemaking. The proceeding has also been linked to a US executive order on positioning, navigation and timing resilience, and FCC chairman Brendan Carr has spoken publicly about GPS vulnerability.

That is the fact worth sitting with. More than 2,000 comments, eighteen months of technical and economic argument, near-unanimous opposition from the industries that use the band, and the proposal is still moving. It is being weighed as national security policy, and in that frame a comment count is not the deciding input.

Nothing has been decided. A draft NPRM is a proposal to propose, not a rule, and the comment cycle that would follow is where the technical detail would finally be tested. But anyone assuming this dies quietly in the record is reading it wrong.

What this means if you are specifying equipment

Readers bought now will be in the field well into the 2030s. Three things follow.

If you deploy in the United States, the question to put to your vendor is what their roadmap looks like if the usable band narrows to 907 to 918 MHz, and specifically whether current hardware can be recertified for narrower hopping channels or whether it becomes a replacement. Get the answer in writing.

If you deploy in Europe or Asia-Pacific, the immediate risk is not to your own operation, because your regulator is not doing this. The risk is to the economics of the equipment you buy. Global harmonisation in the 915 to 921 MHz overlap is why a reader can be built once and sold everywhere, and the moment the US upper band behaves differently from everyone else’s, that advantage starts to erode for all of us.

And if you operate across both, which most large deployments now do, the harmonisation that made a single hardware platform viable is the thing actually at stake. That is worth more than any of the cost figures being traded in the filings.

RFID News will report from RAIN in Action in Madrid from 29 September to 1 October 2026, where the conference agenda includes a session on radio regulations. We will follow this proceeding as it develops. For more on where the technology is heading, see our interview with Aileen Ryan of the RAIN Alliance, and our continuing coverage of RAIN RFID.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

bpost is Belgium’s national postal operator, listed on Euronext Brussels, and it handles more than 500,000 parcels a day, rising above 800,000 in the December peak. Roll containers are the metal mesh carts that move those parcels inside and between distribution and sorting centres, each holding up to 30 items. At 93,000 units the pool is a capital asset nobody could previously count.

Why a pool of 93,000 carts is hard to manage

Roll cages do not sit still in one controlled environment. They pass through sorter chutes, staging areas, dock doors, vehicles and on to customer and partner sites, where they can linger for weeks. What bpost needed was not the position of one cage but a continuously updated picture of how the whole pool was distributed.

One housing, two air interfaces

Each cage carries a customised Beontag Viking Hybrid beacon. Beontag manufactures RFID inlays, labels and BLE beacons, and its published specification for the Viking Hybrid gives a 68 x 47 x 28 mm IP68 sealed housing that clips onto mesh panels up to 5 mm in diameter, with improved on-metal performance and a non-replaceable coin cell rated beyond ten years. The passive side is an NXP UCODE 9xm working across the global 865 to 928 MHz band, which puts it squarely in UHF RAIN RFID territory. The active side is an InPlay IN100 radio broadcasting BLE at 2.4 GHz in Eddystone and iBeacon frame formats. Beontag quotes ranges of up to 10 m for RFID and up to 70 m for BLE.

The split of duties follows the physics. Passive RFID gives fast, precise, power-free identification at fixed process points such as dock doors and portals, where cages pass a known reader in bulk. BLE, a low-power radio protocol for battery devices that advertise their identity to any listener in range, covers the wide areas in between: buildings, vehicle interiors and external sites with no portal. GPS fixes from bpost’s own mobile devices add outdoor and customer-site positioning, so a cage parked at a retailer does not vanish.

Turning raw reads into trustworthy events

Three technologies reporting independently produce a great deal of noise. Lyngsoe LIVE takes readings from all of them, filters duplicate and adjacent reads, validates and enriches the data, then applies business logic to turn it into logistics events staff can act on. Above that sits Lyngsoe’s Asset Flow Management application, software that tracks the reusable containers themselves rather than the goods inside them, presenting one view of inventory, arrivals and departures, flows between locations, dwell times, assets in transit, container histories and tag health.

What the 85% figure actually means

Because bpost now knows how many containers it has and where they are, it can use them harder. Since the project began the operator has cut its purchases of new containers, and the associated budget, by 85% with no impact on operations, and Lyngsoe states the investment has already paid for itself. Live and historical data also expose slow-moving assets and long dwell times, which lets bpost chase down underused cages and hold internal and external sites to account for the ones in their yards. The same data shapes transport flows during peak, when the company can intervene early if a local shortage or surplus is building.

From container visibility to parcel visibility

The more interesting extension is linking each parcel to the cage it travels in. Do that and every container movement becomes an extra tracking event through sorting, staging, loading, transport and arrival, with no separate manual parcel scan at each stage. For the indoor precision that needs, bpost is exploring BLE Angle of Arrival, which measures the direction a signal arrives from across a multi-element antenna array to derive a bearing and so a position, rather than inferring proximity to a receiver. Combined with parcel, manifest and RFID data, that could pin down the sorter chute, buffer area or staging lane a cage occupies, and flag an incorrect container before it is loaded. Lyngsoe says the platform can extend to reusable bulk bags and last-mile e-bikes.

Shortlisted in London, pipped in the category

The project was shortlisted for Transportation Innovation of the Year at the Parcel and Postal Technology International Awards, whose ceremony was held in London on 23 September 2026. bpost did not take the category: it went to Pošta Slovenije for its PS Delivery Points platform. bpost did win that evening, sharing Environmental Achievement of the Year with telematics company Geotab, but for a separate CO2-neutral last-mile fleet project, not container tracking.

Lyngsoe Systems was founded in 1952 and is based in Aars, Denmark. Comparable postal deployments it names include Posti with more than 100,000 roll cages and Swiss Post with 600 RFID portals covering 70,000 containers. More of the same sit in our case studies, logistics and asset tracking sections.

Read more at https://lyngsoesystems.com/logistics/postal-and-parcels/cases/bpost-transforms-logistics-flows-with-real-time-tracking-of-93-000-roll-containers

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Automatic train protection, or ATP, is the class of system that sits behind the driver and intervenes when a train does something the signalling does not allow. Kavach, developed indigenously by Indian Railways, helps loco pilots hold the prescribed speed limit and brakes automatically if a critical situation demands it. Its central purpose is preventing a Signal Passing At Danger, or SPAD, where a train runs past a signal set to stop, and it is also meant to control speed in emergencies and keep operations safer in adverse weather.

The jump from Kavach 3.2 to 4.0 comes out of operating experience with 3.2, already working over 1,465 route kilometres of South Central Railway. Four improvements matter most: greater location accuracy for precise train positioning, better information on signal aspects in larger yards, station to station communication over optical fibre cable, and direct integration with existing electronic interlocking. Version 4.0 requires Safety Integrity Level 4 certification, SIL-4, the most demanding of the four integrity levels in railway functional safety, and Indian Railways intends it for large-scale deployment across the network.

Fitting Kavach to a section takes Station Kavach equipment at stations and in block sections, RFID tags along the track, telecommunication towers, optical fibre cable, and Loco Kavach equipment on the locomotives.

What the trackside tags actually do

The tags are the least glamorous item on that list and the one everything else leans on. A locomotive can measure distance travelled from wheel rotations, but odometry drifts: wheels wear, slip under power and lock under braking, and the error grows the longer the train runs without a fix. A system that does not know exactly where the train is cannot enforce a restriction that begins at a specific point, or tell whether a train is approaching a stop signal or has passed it. Each tag the reader passes over resets the onboard calculation to a surveyed location, and every braking and speed decision Kavach makes is built on that.

Under the Kavach specification issued by the Research Designs and Standards Organisation, RDSO/SPN/196, the tags are fitted to the sleepers between the rails and work in the 865 to 867 MHz UHF RFID band allocated for the technology in India. RDSO is Indian Railways’ own research and standards body. The tags have to read reliably at train speeds of at least 200 km/h.

Redundancy is designed in at both ends. Tags are duplicated at every location, carrying identical information apart from the absolute location data tied to that spot, so one damaged or unreadable tag does not leave a train without a position fix. On the locomotive, each Kavach unit has two RFID readers running in hot standby. The reader is mounted underneath the locomotive body and has to survive it: rugged against vibration, rated for speeds up to 200 km/h, and rated to at least IP65 outside the loco or IP64 inside. Few UHF RFID applications combine that read speed with that much mechanical abuse.

Three more sections inside seven days

Three further Kavach milestones landed between 19 and 24 September 2026, each with a published tag count.

The Jhansi division of North Central Railway, the zone covering parts of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, commissioned Kavach on the Gwalior to Jhansi section, excluding Gwalior and Veerangana Lakshmibai Jhansi stations, and reported it on 23 September 2026. Some 1,596 RFID tags were installed to supply train identification and location information, and the system protects against head-on and rear-end collisions, roll-away and standstill situations. Jhansi divisional railway manager Aniruddh Kumar said: “The project was executed by Project Unit, Jhansi, with the active participation of the signal and telecommunications department and other railway teams.”

On Thursday 24 September 2026, North Central Railway commissioned Standard Kavach on the 52.46 km Agra Cantt to Dholpur section, with 720 RFID tags giving the system precise train location and operational data.

On 19 and 20 September 2026 the Solapur Division of Central Railway, another Indian Railways zone, ran the first Independent Safety Assessor audit trial of Kavach 4.0 on that zone. An Independent Safety Assessor is an outside party with no stake in the project, brought in to confirm a safety system does what it claims; this team came from Italy. The full-functionality trial ran on both Up and Down lines of the Kurduvadi to Boribial section, 104.7 route kilometres, with 1,430 RFID tags installed and programmed to the approved design and to standards prescribed by RDSO.

The scenarios validated make a useful list of what an ATP system is expected to do: SPAD prevention, including after a sudden signal put-back; permanent speed restriction and loop-line speed control; roll-away protection on a down gradient; automatic SOS generation when a train stops unexpectedly inside a block section; and manual SOS raised either through SMOCIP, the station master’s Kavach panel, or by the loco pilot on the onboard unit.

Between them, those three newly tagged stretches account for 3,746 trackside RFID tags: 1,596 plus 720 plus 1,430. Where the section length is published the density is consistent, at roughly 13.7 tags per route kilometre on both Agra Cantt to Dholpur and Kurduvadi to Boribial. That sets the arithmetic for a national rollout: every tag has to be surveyed, programmed with its own location data, fixed to a sleeper and kept readable under passing trains.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

C&A is a clothing retailer of European origin, trading in Brazil since 1976 and listed on the São Paulo stock exchange B3 since 2019. As of September 2026 it runs 339 Brazilian stores and employs around 15,000 people there. The format it is rolling out across that estate, called Energia, shows what six years of item-level tagging lets a fashion chain build on top.

The tag layer, laid down in 2020

The project began in June 2020 at the Shopping Tamboré store in Barueri, São Paulo state, with Sensormatic Solutions, a retail loss prevention and inventory intelligence vendor, supplying the tags and software plus consulting, installation, training and project management. The pilot was scoped at ten stores: Tamboré, two in Rio de Janeiro, one in Brasília, one in Belo Horizonte and five more in São Paulo.

The numbers quoted then were the familiar ones for apparel: a read rate of around 250 items per minute, inventory accuracy up to 95%, and lost online sales from abandoned orders cut by up to half. GS1 Brasil, the Brazilian arm of the standards body behind the barcode and the EPC numbering scheme RFID tags carry, wrote the project up in October 2020 and put the ceiling higher, above 98% accuracy per item, the payoff being fewer markdowns and stock exposed to the digital store down to the last unit. C&A had more than 280 stores in Brazil at that point.

No source states a frequency band or air interface for C&A’s tags, and the retailer has not disclosed one. As generic context, reading hundreds of garments a minute and counting a whole shop floor is the application class served by passive UHF RAIN RFID, defined by EPC Gen2 and ISO/IEC 18000-63.

Francislei Donatti, then Vice-President of Commercial Operations at C&A, put the pilot in omnichannel terms. “With this system in our stores, we are achieving much greater accuracy and consequently providing faster responses about product availability,” he said. The commercial logic is a figure C&A cites repeatedly: around 80% of customers entering one of its physical stores say they researched the product online first.

From ten stores to a national programme

Scaling was quick. By September 2021 C&A had 100 stores live on RFID across 125 cities in Brazil, with a target of 200 by the end of that year. Alan Yarschel, Supply Chain Director at C&A, described the aim as pushing stock accuracy above 95% in order to grow e-commerce, and the reported result was that the assortment visible to online customers nearly doubled. Tagging does not add stock. It makes existing stock sellable by making the count trustworthy enough to publish.

Sensormatic said in 2021 that more than 10,000 stores used its RFID solution, and the 2021 coverage cited deployments at Zara, Macy’s, Sears and Lululemon as showing average sales increases of around 10%, the figure that keeps recurring across fashion retail rollouts. Vanessa do Valle, Business Developer Manager at Sensormatic Solutions, had called the direction in 2020, with interest in the firm’s RFID offering up around 40% in the preceding months: “the use of RFID technology should increase substantially soon and become established as a trend in the retail sector.”

What Energia stacks on the tag layer

Energia is where six years of tagging stop being a stock control story. Self-checkout is the obvious beneficiary: an untagged apparel basket has to be scanned garment by garment, which is the job shoppers are worst at, while a tagged basket reads in one pass. Payment sits on top of that, including facial biometric authentication marketed as “pay with a smile” for holders of the C&A Pay digital card, which the retailer says verifies a purchase in seconds.

Fitting rooms carry totems that let a customer request another size or colour without getting dressed again, which only works if the system knows, to the unit and in real time, what is on the floor and in the stockroom. Where nearby stores do not have the item, staff can locate it elsewhere and arrange home delivery.

The C&A app carries the same data into the customer’s hand: scan a product, check real-time availability, locate a specific item inside the store, read reviews, call for staff help and complete the purchase in-app while standing in the shop. In-store product location is the feature that gives the game away. You cannot direct a shopper to a garment you cannot see, and a periodic manual count cannot see it. Retail RFID is usually sold on shrink and accuracy; here it is the addressing system for the shop floor.

The format becomes the standard

The first Energia store opened at Shopping Center Norte in São Paulo’s North Zone on 22 August 2025, around 3,400 square metres over two floors, also by Gensler, with an open shopfront and no display windows, zones for jeans, basics, the ACE sportswear line and the Mindse7 contemporary line, and a cafeteria run with the chain The Coffee. “This new concept crystallises our Energia strategy, providing customers with broader assortment and great product value perception,” said Paulo Correa, CEO of C&A Brasil, who added that it would be tested for several months before becoming the official model for refits and new stores in 2026. C&A operated over 300 Brazilian stores at that point.

The test became the rollout. At the BarraShopping reopening on 9 August 2026 the company had 26 stores in the city of Rio, 47 across the state and three units nationally on the format. Two more followed in September 2026: Butantã Shopping in western São Paulo, managed by Carrefour Property, opened on Thursday 20 September at over 1,500 square metres with Click and Collect and self-checkout, taking the chain to 176 stores in the Southeast region and 50 in the city of São Paulo, and a store of over 1,300 square metres opened at the Iguatemi mall in São José do Rio Preto on 22 September 2026.

The open question about paying with a smile

The biometric element deserves more scrutiny than the launch coverage gave it. “Pay with a smile” is facial recognition in a shop, and facial geometry is biometric data. Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados, the LGPD, in force since 2020, treats biometric data as sensitive personal data, with narrower lawful bases than ordinary personal data and, in most commercial cases, a requirement for specific and highlighted consent.

Nothing in the reporting suggests C&A handles this improperly. What the reporting does not do is say how enrolment works: whether a C&A Pay cardholder opts in explicitly and separately, what becomes of the facial template, where it is stored, how long it is kept and how consent is withdrawn. Those answers decide whether a feature like this is a convenience or a compliance problem, and none of the coverage of the Energia stores addresses them. An RFID tag identifies a garment. A face identifies a person.

Tags as substrate, not as a stock tool

Most RFID coverage in apparel stops at accuracy and shrink, because that is where the business case is easiest to write. C&A Brasil shows what happens after that case is won. The 2020 Tamboré pilot was sold on inventory accuracy and abandoned online orders; six years on, the same tag data lets a shopper check a size from the fitting room, find a rail from a phone and leave through a self-checkout without staff touching the garments. For anyone weighing a first garment tagging pilot, the question is not what accuracy figure the tags deliver next year, but what the business can build in 2032 because the data exists.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

H&M, formally Hennes & Mauritz, is the Swedish retailer that is one of the largest apparel chains in the world by store count. It has been shifting to RFID-tagged stock for years: GS1 UK records a 2018 rollout across 1,800 stores in 12 markets, with more planned for 2019, while noting that H&M has never published the results of those trials. Shenzhen Chainway Information Technology is a Chinese manufacturer of RFID readers, handheld computers and data-capture hardware.

The problem is the halfway point, not the endgame

The difficulty Chainway describes will be familiar to any retailer partway through a tagging programme. H&M stores handle a mixed estate of stock. Most apparel carries a UHF tag, but some items are still barcode-only, and tags in the field get damaged, obscured or torn off. Handling both conventionally means two devices on the counter, two workflows for the cashier and a transaction that can stall when a tag will not read.

Chainway names three pressures behind the deployment: the hybrid item environment itself, queue congestion at peak trading hours caused by item-by-item barcode scanning, and the continuity risk of relying on RFID alone when a tag is unreadable.

What the SR160 actually is

The SR160 is a desk-format scanner built around Chainway’s own UHF module. Chainway’s published specification lists support for the EPCglobal Class 1 Gen 2 air interface, also known as ISO 18000-6C, plus Impinj’s proprietary Gen2X extensions, an adjustable read range of 7 cm to 100 cm with 30 cm given as the recommended working distance, and USB, RS-232 or Bluetooth connection to a host. It is supported on Windows, Linux and macOS.

Impinj’s own write-up of the device, published in May 2023, identifies the reader chip as the E310 and describes the practical point of the design: the scanner toggles between three modes, barcode only, RAIN RFID only, or hybrid, at the push of a button rather than through a software change. If you are new to the terminology, Gen2, RAIN RFID and UHF are covered in our RFID glossary.

The workflow at the till

According to the case study, each checkout counter at the participating stores was fitted with one SR160 wired or paired to the existing POS terminal. The cashier places tagged items within the reader’s sensing field and the SR160 identifies them together, passing the product data to the POS for billing. Where an item fails to register because its tag is damaged, missing or unreadable, the cashier scans the printed barcode with the same device. Chainway describes this as an RFID-first, barcode-backup workflow, and stresses that no additional hardware or process redesign was needed at the point of sale.

The numbers, and whose numbers they are

Every performance figure in this deployment is Chainway’s, published in Chainway’s marketing of its own product. H&M has not published its own account of the trial, and the case study names no country, no number of stores and no individual, describing the sites only as selected high-volume stores. Read the figures on that basis. After several months of operation Chainway reports checkout time reduced by up to 80 per cent versus barcode-only scanning, missed or duplicated scan errors down by more than 70 per cent, one SR160 replacing two separate scanners at each counter, less device switching for staff, higher customer satisfaction scores, and better consistency between sales and inventory data because both RFID and barcode reads feed the same POS record.

That last point is the least headline-friendly and probably the most durable. A store running two scanning systems in parallel tends to end up with two versions of what it sold. Feeding both read types through one device and one data path is what makes real-time stock visibility survive the transition period, which for most retail chains is measured in years rather than months.

Read more at https://chainway.net/Cases/Info/243

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

IATA Resolution 753: The Catalyst for Change

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) passed Resolution 753 in 2019, requiring all member airlines to track baggage at four key points: passenger handover, loading onto the aircraft, transfer between flights, and arrival at the carousel. The goal was straightforward: reduce the rate of mishandled bags, which at the time cost the global industry over $2.4 billion annually.

Barcode systems could technically meet the requirement, but their read rates hovered around 80-85% in real-world airport conditions. Dirty labels, crumpled tags, and awkward scan angles meant one in five bags could slip through unread. UHF RAIN RFID tags changed the equation entirely. With read rates consistently above 99%, even when tags are scuffed, folded, or partially obscured, RFID gave airlines a technology that could actually deliver on the promise of end-to-end baggage visibility.

Delta Air Lines: The Industry Benchmark

Delta Air Lines was among the first major carriers to go all-in on RFID baggage tracking. The airline began embedding UHF RAIN RFID inlays into its bag tags in 2016, rolling out RFID readers at check-in counters, baggage handling systems, and arrival carousels across its domestic network. By 2018, Delta reported a 99.9% bag tracking accuracy rate, a figure that turned heads across the industry.

The payoff was not just operational. Delta built its “Track My Bag” feature directly on the RFID data, giving passengers real-time visibility into their luggage location through the Fly Delta app. Customer satisfaction scores climbed, and the airline estimated it saved hundreds of millions in mishandled baggage costs over the first few years of deployment.

Other carriers followed. Lufthansa, Hong Kong International Airport, and several Middle Eastern airlines adopted similar RFID baggage programmes. Today, IATA estimates that around 60% of global baggage is now tracked using RFID, with that figure climbing steadily.

MRO and Parts Management: Where Safety Meets Compliance

Baggage is only half the story. In maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) operations, RFID is solving problems that directly affect flight safety. Aircraft contain thousands of rotable parts, each with strict lifecycle limits, inspection intervals, and certification records. Historically, tracking these components relied on paper logs, manual data entry, and physical inspection of part numbers stamped into metal.

RFID tagging of aircraft components allows maintenance teams to scan and verify parts in seconds rather than minutes. Tags embedded in or attached to components carry unique identifiers linked to digital records containing the full maintenance history, certification status, and remaining service life. This eliminates transcription errors, speeds up inspections, and provides an auditable digital trail that satisfies regulatory bodies like the FAA and EASA.

Airbus has been a vocal proponent of RFID in MRO, implementing tagging programmes across its supply chain and recommending RFID-enabled parts tracking to its airline customers. Boeing has pursued similar initiatives, particularly for high-value rotable components where traceability is non-negotiable.

Looking Ahead

The aviation sector shows no signs of slowing its RFID adoption. With IATA continuing to push for 100% baggage tracking compliance and regulatory bodies tightening parts traceability requirements, airlines that have not yet deployed RFID are running out of reasons to delay. The technology has proven itself at scale, and the cost of inaction, both financial and reputational, grows larger every year.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.