When people talk about RFID and asset tracking, the conversation often stays at the level of knowing where something is. That is valuable, but it is only the beginning. The organisations getting the most from RFID-based asset management have moved well beyond location awareness into a much richer set of capabilities: maintenance scheduling, utilisation measurement, compliance assurance, and lifecycle cost management. The difference between a basic asset tracking deployment and a mature one is the difference between a map and a management system.

The Baseline: Knowing What You Have and Where It Is

Before any of the more sophisticated capabilities become possible, the fundamentals have to work. That means every asset is tagged, every tag is linked to an accurate record in the asset management system, and the infrastructure to read those tags reliably is in place. This sounds straightforward but is consistently underestimated in scope.

Large organisations often discover during RFID tagging projects that their asset register is significantly wrong. Equipment that was written off years ago is still physically present. Equipment that appears on the register does not exist. Assets are recorded in the wrong location, assigned to the wrong cost centre, or duplicated across multiple records. The tagging project becomes an asset audit, and that audit frequently changes the numbers in ways that affect depreciation schedules, insurance valuations, and capital planning.

Getting the baseline right is worth the effort. An RFID system built on a clean, accurate asset register delivers reliable data from day one. One built on a corrupted register produces confident-looking numbers that are wrong in ways that are hard to detect and harder to correct.

Maintenance and Inspection Management

Once assets are tagged and located, RFID can drive maintenance workflows in ways that manual systems cannot match for reliability or efficiency. The principle is simple: when a maintenance technician scans a tag, the asset management system knows exactly which piece of equipment is being serviced, by whom, and when. The service record updates automatically. The next scheduled inspection date advances. If an asset comes due for inspection and has not been scanned by the expected date, an alert is generated.

This matters most for equipment where maintenance compliance is a regulatory or safety requirement. Pressure vessels, lifting equipment, fire suppression systems, electrical test equipment, and medical devices all fall into categories where documented inspection schedules are mandatory. RFID-driven maintenance records provide an audit trail that paper-based systems struggle to match for completeness and tamper-resistance. The tag on the asset is the link between the physical object and its entire service history.

In field service environments, technicians with mobile devices can access the full maintenance history of an asset by scanning its tag, see what work is due, record what was done, and flag any issues for follow-up. The round trip from physical asset to digital record and back happens in seconds rather than requiring a return to the office to update a spreadsheet.

Utilisation Measurement

Asset utilisation is one of the most consequential metrics in equipment management and one of the hardest to measure accurately without automated tracking. How many hours per day is a piece of equipment actually in use? Which assets sit idle for long periods while similar assets are overworked? Where are the bottlenecks in a production or service environment caused by equipment availability rather than throughput capacity?

RFID-based RTLS (real-time location systems) can provide continuous utilisation data by tracking when equipment is moved, where it goes, and how long it stays there. In a hospital, this tells you which infusion pumps are in active use and which have been parked in a corridor for three days. In a construction environment, it tells you which plant and machinery is operating on site and which is sitting unused. In a manufacturing facility, it tells you which tool sets are on the production floor and which are in the crib.

Utilisation data has direct financial consequences. Organisations that measure utilisation accurately consistently find that they own more equipment than they need in aggregate, even when individual departments report shortages. The shortage is often a distribution problem rather than a capacity problem: equipment is concentrated in the wrong places. RFID-driven utilisation data makes this visible and creates the evidence base for rebalancing rather than buying more.

Lifecycle Cost Management

Every asset has a lifecycle: acquisition, deployment, maintenance, and eventual disposal or replacement. Managing that lifecycle well requires data about each stage, and RFID provides the mechanism to capture that data consistently and automatically.

Acquisition cost is typically well recorded. What is less well recorded is the total maintenance cost accumulated over the asset’s life, the downtime cost associated with failures and scheduled outages, and the depreciation trajectory relative to actual condition. RFID-driven maintenance records, combined with the cost data from work orders and parts consumption, build a complete picture of what each asset actually costs over its life rather than what it was budgeted to cost.

This lifecycle data informs replacement decisions. An asset that has low book value but high ongoing maintenance cost may be a better candidate for early replacement than the depreciation schedule suggests. An asset that has been well maintained and shows low failure rates may justify extended life beyond the standard replacement cycle. Without the data, these decisions are made on intuition and budget availability. With it, they can be made on evidence.

Compliance and Chain of Custody

In regulated industries, the ability to demonstrate that an asset was where it was supposed to be, maintained when it was supposed to be maintained, and handled by authorised personnel is not just operationally useful — it is a compliance requirement. RFID provides an automatic, time-stamped record of asset movements and maintenance events that is far more reliable than manual logs.

Chain of custody applications extend this into security-sensitive environments. High-value equipment, controlled substances in pharmaceutical settings, classified documents in government facilities, and weapons in law enforcement contexts all benefit from RFID-based tracking that records every movement and flags any deviation from authorised patterns. The tag cannot be moved without generating a record, which changes the accountability dynamic fundamentally compared to manual sign-out systems.

Building the Business Case

Asset tracking RFID deployments tend to generate compelling ROI figures because the savings are real and measurable. Reduced equipment rental spend when owned assets are properly utilised. Lower maintenance costs when preventive schedules are followed reliably. Avoided capital expenditure when utilisation data shows adequate capacity exists. Reduced compliance risk from complete audit trails. And the one-time benefit of correcting an asset register that turns out to be significantly inaccurate.

The organisations that realise these benefits are the ones that treat asset tracking as a management discipline enabled by RFID, not an RFID project that happens to track assets. The technology is the tool. The value comes from using the data it generates to make better decisions every day.

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 requirement would be imposed under Part 1 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which lets the CMA set binding conduct rules on firms it has designated as holding Strategic Market Status, a finding of substantial and entrenched market power in a digital activity. Apple received that designation for its mobile platform on 22 October 2025, and NFC access was flagged as a candidate intervention in that decision and in the CMA’s interventions roadmap for Apple of 23 July 2025. Responses close at 5pm on 17 November 2026, to mobilesms@cma.gov.uk, and Apple has confirmed it will not use confidentiality provisions to stop parties responding.

HCE or Secure Element, at the developer’s choice

Apple has historically reserved the NFC hardware and software on iPhone for Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. In October 2024 it opened a route in the UK and other jurisdictions through its NFC and SE Platform, but that route is Secure Element only. A secure element is a dedicated, tamper-resistant chip embedded in the handset which holds the credential and manages the NFC exchange locally, so a transaction completes without a network round trip.

Host Card Emulation inverts the model. The credential stays off the device on a remote server, which sends a limited number of one-time-use tokens down to the handset, and the card emulation runs in software on the application processor rather than on a secure chip. Android has supported HCE since Android 4.4 in 2013, and the consultation document is explicit that neither HCE nor SE was developed by Apple and that neither is specific to any platform or technology provider. Both ride the same 13.56 MHz high-frequency air interface, so to a reader at a terminal a tap is a tap. The RFID glossary covers the underlying terms.

Apple argued that any intervention should be confined to SE. The CMA is rejecting that, and its central evidence is an absence: two years after the NFC and SE Platform became available, it found no evidence of any NFC app launching in the UK using it. Mastercard Wallet Services was announced on the platform in July 2026 and Visa Token Service support for iOS secure element use cases in September 2026, but the CMA treats that as some movement against a need for much broader uptake. The counts of developers authorised for or applying to the platform are redacted in the published document.

Build time is the other half of the argument. Banks and fintechs already running HCE in the European Economic Area or on Android told the CMA they could repurpose those systems for the UK in two weeks to three months, against 12 months or more for a secure element build. A bank starting from scratch put HCE at 12 to 18 months and SE at 18 months or more. Applet certification, SE-specific code and the extra provisioning and credential lifecycle management are what stretch the schedule.

The European comparison is concrete. In July 2024 the European Commission accepted legally binding commitments from Apple to provide HCE-based NFC access for payments across the EEA free of charge, with supporting functionality including default wallet choice. On 9 December 2024, Vipps MobilePay, the Norwegian and Danish payments app, became the first developer anywhere to launch an alternative to Apple Pay on iPhone. PayPal followed in Germany in May 2025, Curve in June 2025, BBVA with BBVA Pay with Visa in Spain in October 2025, and Klarna with Tap to Pay across 14 markets in December 2025.

The stakeholder view is not uniformly anti-SE. Two banks said that if forced to pick one technology they would take SE for its better offline behaviour, though both backed a dual-technology approach, and several respondents treat SE as the value-added route for high-assurance credentials and standards that mandate a secure element.

The definition reaches well past payments

The draft defines an NFC Transaction as presenting, receiving, authenticating or verifying cryptographically protected information, for payment and non-payment use cases alike. It names in-store contactless payments, transit, account-to-account payments and stablecoin on the payment side, and digital identity services, loyalty cards, car and hotel keys and corporate badges on the non-payment side. That breadth is the part worth reading twice if you work in access control or credential issuance rather than payments: a physical access credential, a hotel key or a mobile employee badge delivered through a vendor’s own iOS app, instead of as a pass inside Apple Wallet, would sit inside the scope of the obligation.

Express Mode and Power Reserve: the transit parity clause

Paragraph 8 of the draft decides whether third-party transit and access apps are viable at all. It would oblige Apple to provide interoperable access to all of the iOS functionality used by Express Mode and Power Reserve. Express Mode is Apple’s feature that lets a compatible credential be used in a contactless transaction without the user unlocking the device or authenticating the transaction. Power Reserve keeps those credentials working for a limited period when the handset has too little power for iOS to run normally.

Those two features are what make a phone work at a ticket gate. Without them, a third-party transit app would demand an unlock and a biometric check at every tap, which fails the dwell time a gate allows. The draft would let a third-party app holding default NFC status complete unauthenticated taps wherever Apple Pay and Apple Wallet would not require authentication, and transact with the screen on or off.

Fees, defaults and the compliance clock

Pricing is where the fight will be. Apple’s structure for the NFC and SE Platform combines a periodic provisioning fee per credential with a per-transaction fee. Stakeholders told the CMA that makes entry commercially unviable: one said the per-transaction charge means the effective cost of a bank-enabled wallet rises as average transaction value falls, which hits debit cards hardest; another said the economics break outright where a customer loads a card into a third-party wallet and then rarely uses it, because the transaction fee the wallet earns is lower than the fee it pays Apple. Concerns were also raised about the fixed-fee element and about charges stepping up above a user threshold. The per-tap figures card issuers actually pay are redacted in the published document.

The CMA’s position is that those fees are too high to support viable entry, that the underlying technology was not developed by Apple and is often provided for free or with minimal fees by other mobile providers such as Google, and that it would therefore expect any resulting fees to be “low and substantially lower than Apple’s current charges”. Rather than set a price, the draft sets four principles each fee must satisfy: cost-based, value-based, flexibility and administrative simplicity. The value-based principle requires adjusting for Apple’s market power, and Apple must exclude costs relating to its own downstream products that use NFC access. The flexibility principle requires fee structures that reflect usage frequency and how revenue is generated per NFC tap, with developers able to switch between structures.

The rest is plumbing, and plumbing is where access remedies usually fail. Access must stay effective and of adequate quality, with no unjustified restriction through contractual terms, technical design requirements, app review or enforcement practices, and it must be continuous, with suspension allowed only on a credible threat of serious harm to iOS security, privacy or integrity, or to UK end-users. Developer commercial information could be used only in connection with providing access, ring-fenced from staff working on Apple Wallet, Apple Pay or any competing Apple product. UK end-users would also have to be able to set a third-party app as the Default NFC App, defined as the app iOS launches automatically on a tap unless a different contactless app is open on screen at that moment, and Apple would have to expose a Default Status API so a developer can check whether its app holds that status.

If imposed, the requirement would come into force three months after the final decision. Apple would file an implementation plan within one month, the first iOS version released after that decision would have to carry the necessary technical infrastructure, and compliance reports would follow every three months. The prize the CMA puts on the other side of that work: the UK accounts for roughly 11% of the global fintech sector, 58% of UK adults used mobile payments regularly in 2025 on UK Finance figures, and around 22 million people in the UK use Apple Wallet and Apple Pay at least monthly on the CMA’s estimate.

Read more at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6ad772868ef5e8a9fc8ed610/Consultation_document__NFC_access_.pdf

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.

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.

RFID deployments are sold on business cases. Improved inventory accuracy, reduced labour costs, lower shrinkage, faster receiving, better asset utilisation — the projected benefits are quantified, presented to stakeholders, and used to justify the investment. What happens less consistently is a rigorous check, six or twelve months after go-live, of whether those projected benefits actually materialised. A post-implementation review (PIR) closes that loop, and doing it properly is one of the most valuable things you can do for the long-term health of an RFID programme.

Why PIRs Are Skipped

The reasons organisations skip post-implementation reviews are understandable even if they are not good. The project team has moved on to other things. The business case figures feel like ancient history once the system is live. Nobody wants to surface a finding that the investment underperformed. And in many organisations, the governance that enforced rigour during the project phase dissolves the moment the system goes live.

The result is that a significant proportion of RFID deployments run for years without anyone formally establishing whether the system delivered what was promised. Benefits that were partially realised are treated as fully realised. Problems that could be corrected with modest intervention persist because they are never properly diagnosed. And the organisation loses the opportunity to learn from the deployment in ways that would improve the next one.

What to Measure

The starting point for a PIR is the original business case. Every projected benefit should become a measurement question. If the business case promised a reduction in inventory count cycle time from four hours to forty-five minutes, measure the actual cycle time six months after go-live. If it promised inventory accuracy improvement from 72 percent to 95 percent, measure actual accuracy against a physical audit. If it promised a reduction in lost or rented equipment costs, pull the maintenance and procurement data.

Alongside the business case metrics, measure the operational health of the system itself. Read rate performance by location tells you where the infrastructure is underperforming and whether it has degraded since installation. Tag failure rates in the field indicate whether the tag specification was right for the environment. System uptime and middleware error rates show whether the technology stack is stable. These operational metrics often explain why business benefits are or are not being realised.

Staff adoption is a metric that is easy to overlook but frequently explains performance gaps. An RFID system that associates have found ways to work around is not delivering its potential regardless of what the hardware can do. Observation of actual workflows, combined with data on how frequently handheld readers are used and whether cycle count completion rates match expectations, gives you a picture of real adoption rather than assumed adoption.

Comparing Like with Like

One of the methodological challenges in any PIR is isolating the effect of the RFID system from other changes that happened at the same time. If inventory accuracy improved by fifteen percentage points but the organisation also changed its stockroom procedures and hired a new operations manager in the same period, attributing all of the improvement to RFID overstates the technology’s contribution. Equally, if accuracy only improved by eight percentage points but the organisation simultaneously expanded its product range significantly, the RFID system may actually have performed well against a more demanding baseline.

Where possible, use control groups. If RFID was rolled out to some stores or locations but not others, compare the two populations. If phaseed rollout means some DCs went live before others, the later sites provide a natural comparison point. Pre and post comparisons are the minimum; controlled comparisons are better.

Handling Underperformance

A PIR that finds the deployment underdelivered against the business case is not a failure — it is a diagnosis. The question is why, and the answer usually falls into one of a small number of categories.

Infrastructure gaps are common. Read coverage that was adequate for the original deployment may have become insufficient as the physical environment changed, or antenna placement that looked right on paper turned out to miss key areas in practice. These are fixable with targeted hardware additions or repositioning.

Process adoption failures are probably the most common source of underperformance. The RFID system requires people to change how they work, and if that change was not properly embedded during implementation it will erode over time as old habits reassert themselves. Retraining, process redesign, and management reinforcement are the interventions here, not technology changes.

Data quality problems — incorrect tag encoding, damaged tags, missing tags on incoming product — compound over time and undermine the accuracy of the inventory record the system maintains. A data quality audit is often the first step in diagnosing a system that seemed to work well initially but has degraded.

Capturing and Sharing the Learning

A PIR produces findings that are valuable beyond the specific deployment being reviewed. What worked well informs the design of the next phase or the next site. What underperformed points to assumptions in the original business case that need to be revisited. What surprised the team — positively or negatively — adds to the organisation’s practical knowledge of how RFID behaves in its specific environment.

Documenting these findings formally and making them available to the people who will design and implement future RFID projects is the step that turns a single deployment into organisational learning. Without it, the same mistakes get made again, the same optimistic assumptions appear in the next business case, and the organisation never gets better at deploying RFID regardless of how much experience it accumulates.

The post-implementation review is not the end of the RFID project. It is the beginning of the next one.

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.

Lager 157 was founded in 1999 by Stefan Palm in Gällstad, a village in western Sweden, and sells low-priced own-brand basics across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, with its first German store opening in Bremen in late 2024. It has grown on product, price and word of mouth rather than advertising, which puts a lot of weight on something very plain: the right size, colour and style being on the shelf when a customer reaches for it.

Why counting a few times a year stops working

Manual stock counts were not keeping up with the pace the business was setting. The pattern will be familiar to anyone running a growing estate of stores. Counts happen a few times a year, the figure is already out of date by the time it is reconciled, and every decision taken in between rests on a number nobody quite trusts.

Three stores, three countries

Between August and October 2025, Lager 157 and ClarityRFID ran Clarity Store, the vendor’s store operations platform, in Naestved in Denmark, Nacka in Sweden and Raisio in Finland. Manual counts were replaced with real-time item-level visibility, and all three stores kept trading normally throughout.

Three markets was a deliberate choice. A single-store pilot proves the software works. Three stores in three countries proves it works against different stock profiles, different store teams and different local processes, which is the question a wider rollout actually turns on.

“The pilot gave us a completely different level of visibility into our stock, down to the individual item. That is exactly the insight we want as we plan our next stores.” Gunnar Palm, Head of Controlling and Business Development, Lager 157.

What the numbers came out at

Stock accuracy reached 98 to 99.8% across the participating stores, and SKU accuracy reached 97%. The two figures are not the same measure: one is how closely the units on hand match the units recorded, the other is how many product lines match exactly, which is the harder test in a business built on sizes and colourways.

Counting also stopped being an event and became a routine, and that is the part that changes behaviour in a store. Once a team can trust the count, replenishment stops being a judgement call, and the conversation moves from what is on the shelf to what should be.

“Lager 157 has built a fast-growing business on getting the basics right for its customers. The pilot showed what item-level inventory visibility can do for a business like theirs.” Michael Quimby, GM, ClarityRFID.

What the pilot sets up

The useful output is a measured baseline rather than a projection, and that is what carries into a wider rollout. The pattern established across the three markets becomes the template for the next set of stores, instead of a one-off exercise that has to be argued from scratch each time a new country is added.

ClarityRFID sells two products: Clarity Supply Chain, which covers RFID auditing in factories and distribution centres, including carton auditing, pack verification, supplier compliance and pallet receiving, and Clarity Store, which covers counting, replenishment, BOPIS and fulfilment, loss prevention, markdowns and store transfers for store teams. The company states 9,000 or more stores across 70 or more countries, says it is hardware agnostic across the major reader manufacturers, and was named a Leader and Top Implementer in ABI Research’s 2025 platform ranking published in the fourth quarter of 2025, placing second of fourteen platforms. SOC 1, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits are described as under way.

More deployments like this one are collected in our case studies and retail sections.

Read more at https://www.clarityrfid.com/lager-157-poc

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 centre, known by its Catalan initials CTFC and based in Solsona in central Catalonia, is a forestry research institute and the coordinator of SINTETIC, short for “Single item identification for forest production, protection and management”. It is a Horizon Europe project under grant agreement 101082051, running from 1 June 2023 to 30 November 2027, with a total cost of 8,634,188.50 euros and an EU contribution of 7,547,650 euros. Its aim is an ICT based traceability system following individual trees, logs and boards across the whole forest based value chain, held together by a central geodatabase.

Three partners ran the pilot. Simtrona, the RFID traceability solutions manufacturer in the consortium, supplied the tag and the insertion method. Arboreal, a Swedish partner, supplied TreeID, the log recognition system; its other SINTETIC tool is TreeScanner, a smartphone LiDAR app for measuring standing trees. Fustes Jane, a Catalan sawmill, hosted the trial and provided the log yard where the timber dried.

Inside the log, not on the bark

Surface identification is the incumbent this trial was designed to beat, and its weakness is familiar to anyone who has worked a log yard. Paint, crayon marks, stapled labels and nailed plates all sit on the outside of the log, where sun bleaches them, moisture lifts them and handling knocks them off. Lose the mark and you lose the link between the log and everything recorded about where it was felled and what grade it is.

Simtrona’s answer is to put the device inside the wood. The chip is seated into an insertion support on an adapted axe, and a single strike drives it into the log, so the surrounding timber closes over it. That leaves the transponder shielded by the wood itself against breakage, against the checks and splits that open up as a log dries, and against rough handling in the yard. It is also quick: CTFC’s own images show an operator marking logs in the stack with one swing of the axe.

What the 87.3% figure actually measures

The headline number needs reading carefully, because it is easy to attribute to the wrong component. The 87.3% is the overall correct identification rate of the combined system, 48 logs out of 55 after months of weather exposure, and CTFC states explicitly that the seven misses are attributable to image quality, not to a failure of the device or the software. The second figure, 100% accuracy within validated identifications, speaks to confidence: where the system returned an identification it accepted, it was right, so the pilot produced no false positives.

The division of labour is the point. The embedded chip carries the unique identity of each log and keeps carrying it through drying and handling. Arboreal’s TreeID image recognition is what was scored across those 55 logs, matching a log’s visible end grain back to its record. The correct reading is not that a tag failed 12.7% of the time, but that identity survived the yard and that the imaging side of the stack is where the remaining work sits.

Why the timing matters

Antonio Ruano, a researcher on the SINTETIC project at the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia, put the result in regulatory terms: “Digitalizing the forestry sector is not merely a matter of operational efficiency, but of data sovereignty and transparency. Traceability reliability is the only guarantee to certify the legal origin of timber, strictly comply with the new European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and maximize the added value of every tree harvested from our forests. If the data flow breaks, the system fails; SINTETIC proves that we can keep information integrity intact under real-world conditions.”

That deadline is close. The EU Deforestation Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1115, obliges operators placing commodities including wood on the EU market to show the material is deforestation free and legally produced. Regulation (EU) 2025/2650, published in December 2025, pushed application back by a further 12 months: large operators must meet their main obligations from 30 December 2026, while natural persons and micro and small enterprises have until 30 June 2027. Durable single item identity is one of the few ways a sawmill can hold a documented chain from stump to board rather than reconstructing it from paperwork, part of the wider push covered in our sustainability section.

What a 55 log pilot proves is worth stating plainly: this is durability evidence, not a deployment. It shows an axe inserted transponder and a recognition layer holding identity through an extended period of outdoor natural drying at a working sawmill, not how the method behaves across species, at thousands of logs a week, or at a reader gate on a moving truck. Neither CTFC nor Simtrona publishes the frequency band or air interface protocol for this tag, which matters because reading through damp wood is a known RF problem and the band largely decides how well it is handled: our RFID glossary covers those trade-offs. SINTETIC runs to 30 November 2027, so there is time to scale the test and publish the detail.

Read more at https://blog.ctfc.cat/en/the-sintetic-project-validates-the-reliability-and-digital-traceability-of-timber-after-months-of-outdoor-drying/

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.

GreyOrange, which describes itself as the global leader in AI-powered multi-agent warehouse orchestration and store inventory software, sells gStore, a retail application built on item-level RFID. Site Bionics comes at the same shop floor from the opposite direction, taking the security cameras a retailer already has on the ceiling and turning them into what the company calls a live, continuously updated model of the store and the people moving through it. A digital twin, in that sense, is a software copy of a physical space kept in step with the real thing by a constant feed of live data. Combined with gStore’s item-level RFID, GreyOrange says retailers get a single AI-driven view of both the products on the floor and the people interacting with them.

The founders are the most revealing detail in the announcement. Site Bionics was founded by Adam Blair, the founding CTO of RADAR, and Don Gillett, the former Head Architect of Amazon Go. RADAR is a retail technology company whose own platform pairs item-level RFID with computer vision to report where stock is sitting in a store in real time, so Blair arrives at GreyOrange from a direct competitor in precisely the space this deal is meant to open up. Amazon Go was Amazon’s checkout-free convenience store format, opened to the public in Seattle in January 2018, which used ceiling cameras and shelf sensors to bill shoppers for what they picked up on the way out. The Site Bionics team has joined GreyOrange, and the technology goes into gStore first, with plans to extend it into warehouse operations through GreyMatter, GreyOrange’s warehouse orchestration software.

“Adam and Don have spent their careers at the frontier of store intelligence, from item-level RFID to the camera systems behind Amazon Go,” said Akash Gupta, CEO of GreyOrange. “Together, we’re giving retailers the ability to do more with the infrastructure they’ve already invested in. The cameras on their ceilings and the RFID tags on their products become one AI-driven picture of everything happening in the store. That means fewer blind spots, faster decisions, and the insight needed to drive more in-store conversions.”

What the combined system is claimed to do

GreyOrange sets out four things the merged product is meant to deliver. First, a live digital twin of the whole store with no new hardware, showing how shoppers and staff move, where they linger and what they interact with, off the existing cameras. Second, AI that explains what it sees: video-language models, trained on video and text together so they can answer questions in plain words about footage, would let a head office ask “Which stores set up the new display as planned?” instead of scrubbing through hours of recordings. Third, RFID and computer vision in one model, which GreyOrange says yields an in-store sales funnel down to the individual item and automates loss investigations so asset protection teams get faster, fuller reports. Fourth, one system in place of the patchwork of separate inventory, shopper behaviour and loss tools most retailers run today.

On privacy, the company says all tracking is anonymous, video is processed on site, and the system sits behind enterprise-grade security and privacy controls. Those are GreyOrange’s assurances rather than audited findings, and a UK retailer putting camera analytics into a shop still has its own obligations to work through.

A promise that has gone unmet

“For years, this industry has promised retailers that RFID and computer vision would come together and show them the full story of their stores. That promise has gone unmet,” said Adam Blair, Co-Founder of Site Bionics. “Don and I built Site Bionics to solve the computer vision side of that equation. GreyOrange has mastered the RFID side. Together, we’re finally delivering on it.”

That is a fair description of where the market has been, and it is worth being precise about why the join is hard. The two technologies answer different questions. RFID gives you identity: a read returns a unique number that resolves to one specific unit of one specific SKU, and it does that whether the item is on a shelf, in the stockroom or buried under other stock, because it never has to be seen. Cameras give you behaviour: who reached, who lingered, who walked away, all inferred from appearance. Fusing the two at item level means asserting that the number read off a tag and the object a camera watched someone pick up are the same thing, and that assertion is where these systems have historically come apart.

The failure modes are mundane and stubborn. Items disappear from view into bags, baskets and pockets while their tags keep reading. Tags read through walls and shelving from the wrong fixture, or from the next department along, so the inventory record and the camera’s view of the aisle disagree. Overhead reader arrays give wide, continuous coverage but coarse position, while a handheld gives a clean cycle count only when somebody walks the floor with it, so the twin’s freshness varies by zone and by shift. And a shopper who picks up three garments, carries them to a mirror and puts two back has produced one camera sequence and several tag movements that have to be reconciled correctly, or the sales funnel is wrong at exactly the item level the product is sold on. Hiring the team that built the camera side of Amazon Go is a serious answer to that. It is also why the promise Blair describes has gone unmet for as long as it has, and why what matters next is evidence rather than architecture.

“After years of putting cameras to work across industries, I’ve learned that a camera’s real value is in what it measures, not what it records,” said Don Gillett, Co-Founder and CTO of Site Bionics. “Site Bionics brings that thinking to retail, using the cameras already on every store’s ceiling. Paired with gStore’s RFID data, the store’s digital twin knows not just where people are, but what they’re doing with the products around them.”

What the announcement does not include

There is no price, no location given for Site Bionics, no named Site Bionics customer and no third-party measurement of what the camera platform achieved before the deal. Everything quantified belongs to gStore, and the figures are GreyOrange’s own: better than 99% inventory accuracy, position to within 3 to 5 ft with store maps down to aisle and shelf, a 40% lift in on-floor availability, twice the associate productivity and go-live in under four weeks. GreyOrange also says gStore is the only platform supporting both overhead and handheld RFID in a single store. Neither the announcement nor the gStore product material names the radio frequency band the tags use.

The scale behind the claim is real enough. GreyOrange said in early September 2026 that more than 3,800 retail locations run on its technology, and H&M Group has been rolling gStore out across hundreds of its own stores since around September 2026. That is a substantial installed base of item-level RFID to point a camera model at, and it is why the deal is worth following: if the fusion works anywhere at scale, it will show up first in stores that already have both halves of the equation in place. Until a named retailer publishes numbers, this remains an acquisition release with a good argument inside it.

More store-level deployments are covered in our retail section and platforms of this kind in software. Terms used here are explained in the RFID glossary.

Read more at https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/10/08/3377349/0/en/greyorange-accelerates-physical-ai-strategy-with-acquisition-of-site-bionics.html

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.

That figure, reported by Patrika on 20 October 2026, is the problem underneath an otherwise straightforward enforcement scheme. Every registered mineral transport vehicle in the state must carry an RF tag on its front windscreen by 6 November 2026. Miss the date and the vehicle’s registration is removed from the e-Khanij portal, the Madhya Pradesh online system through which mineral royalty, permits and transit paperwork are administered. No e-Khanij registration means no legal right to carry sand, stone or aggregate anywhere in the state.

What the order requires

The Madhya Pradesh Mineral Resources Department issued the order on 7 October 2026, under an amendment to the Madhya Pradesh Minerals (Prevention of Illegal Mining, Transportation and Storage) Rules, 2022. The tag is bought by the vehicle owner at the owner’s own cost, through the department’s e-Checkgate portal: enter the vehicle details, fill in billing details, pick a collection point, pay online and collect the tag.

Each tag is generated against one specific vehicle, and the e-Transit Pass issued for that vehicle is then linked to it. The e-Transit Pass, or eTP, is the digital consignment document authorising a particular load of minerals to move from a named mine or depot to a named destination inside a validity window. Tying the tag to the eTP is what turns a roadside gate into an automated audit: the gate reads the tag, pulls the pass behind it and checks whether the vehicle in front of the camera is the vehicle the paperwork describes.

Vivek Porwal, Principal Secretary of the Mineral Resources Department, said when the order went out that vehicle owners had been given one month to fit RF tags. The directive went to all districts, to superintendents of police and to district mineral officers, which puts the police alongside the mining administration in enforcing it.

The gates, and why a number plate is not enough

The tags are read at e-check gates installed across 40 districts of the state under a departmental order issued a year earlier, so the reading infrastructure largely predates the tagging mandate. The gates are unmanned and run automatically. Each carries a verification camera, an automatic number plate reader and an RFID tag reader. ANPR, or automatic number plate recognition, photographs a passing vehicle and converts its registration plate into text, the same technology used on UK bus lanes and car park barriers. Plate reading stays in service alongside the tags rather than being replaced by them.

The reason the department wants a second identifier is the state of the plates. Officials have described drivers smearing mud or cow dung across a number plate, swapping plates between vehicles, cloning the registration of a departmental or official vehicle, or removing the plate altogether. A camera cannot read a plate that is not there. A windscreen tag still answers back.

Amit Mishra, District Mineral Officer for Chhindwara, said in October 2026 that mineral transport is no longer possible without an RF tag and that offending vehicles will be caught as they pass a gate. Chhindwara has two, at Junnardev and on the Nagpur road near Imlikheda, and intends to propose more.

Gwalior’s gates are at Bilaua and Bijauli, the Bilaua checkpost built on a High Court order. The department’s account of Bilaua is that it has cut the movement of trucks running without royalty and raised revenue, and that the site now sees only 250 to 300 trucks a day. When a tipper loaded with aggregate or stone passes the gate, automated sensors scan the windscreen RF tag, and the vehicle number, approved royalty, mineral type and weighbridge weight go straight to the control room. A tagged vehicle can then be identified in other districts too, which is the point of a statewide scheme rather than a district one.

Enforcement that is already biting

A gazette notification of 16 April 2026 gave the penalties their statutory footing, and the six months that followed produced 156 registered cases of illegal mineral transport in Sidhi district alone, with fines imposed. Sidhi’s two gates, at Bagwar in Rampur Naikin tehsil and Koshta Kothar in Churhat tehsil, were launched in May 2026.

Koshta Kothar shows the enforcement in practice. Sand was found moving without a valid eTP, and one eTP was found to have been used more than once. Seven-day demand notices went to the owners of vehicles MP17ZJ9070, MP17ZJ7711, MP53ZB9464, MP53ZE2042 and MP17ZR6479. An unpaid fine triggers automatic cancellation of the vehicle’s mineral registration and seizure.

Keeping the tag working is the owner’s responsibility. Removing, deactivating or damaging it can mean an immediate ban on mineral transport and cancellation of the e-Khanij registration, a sharper penalty than never having fitted one. Kapil Muni Shukla, District Mineral Officer for Sidhi, ran an awareness drive on 18 October 2026, stopping vehicles to explain the requirement to drivers directly. Alongside the state control room at Bhopal, smaller district control rooms are being set up within 20 days, which officials put down to avoiding server problems and tightening monitoring.

What the department has not said

The scheme has been described by officials as working on the lines of FASTag, India’s national electronic toll collection programme, in which a windscreen-mounted RFID tag is read at motorway plazas and the toll is debited from a linked account. FASTag tags are passive UHF devices built to IS 16337, the Indian standard aligned with ISO 18000-63, which is the air interface most people in the industry still call EPC Gen2.

That comparison points towards UHF windscreen tags of the same family, but it is an inference, not a statement. No source in the Madhya Pradesh rollout names the frequency band, and the department has not said whether these tags are FASTag-compatible or even the same class of device. Our RFID glossary sets out what separates the bands in practice.

The open question has a cost attached. A mineral haulier running on national highways almost certainly already carries a FASTag. If the mineral tag is a separate device on the same windscreen, every owner is buying a second tag out of pocket for a vehicle that is already tagged, and the compliance burden doubles for no obvious technical reason. If it is FASTag-compatible, that is a very different conversation. Nobody has published the answer, nor the tag supplier, the price per tag or a statewide count of e-check gates.

The arithmetic of 6 November

Seven tags out of 900 received, inside two days, is under 1% uptake, and there are three ways that ends. A late rush, in which the collection points and the e-Checkgate portal have to absorb most of a district’s fleet in a fortnight. An extension, common enough in Indian compliance deadlines, which would cost the department some of the credibility it built with the gazette notification and the 156 Sidhi cases. Or a large number of vehicles fall off the legal register on 6 November 2026 and keep hauling anyway, which is the illegal mining problem the system exists to solve, only with the trucks now formally outside it.

The numbers deserve some fairness. Gwalior is one district out of 40 with gates installed, the 900 tags are a first-phase allocation rather than the district’s full requirement, and two days is very early in a four-week window. Pankajdhwaj Mishra, District Mineral Officer for Gwalior, said a campaign would be run for RF tags, that they are mandatory for mineral transport trucks, and that action would be taken against owners who do not fit one within a month. A publicity push may well move the number.

Madhya Pradesh is not the first Indian administration to reach for this. In December 2025 we reported that Jammu and Kashmir mandated GPS and RFID for mineral transport vehicles, pairing continuous location tracking with tag-based identification. The Madhya Pradesh approach is narrower, relying on fixed gates rather than onboard telematics, which is cheaper per vehicle but only sees a truck at the moments it chooses to pass a gate. More of this pattern, across mining, tolling and fleet compliance, sits in our vehicle tracking coverage.

The identification problem is the easy part here. A cloned or mud-caked plate defeats a camera and a tag tied to an eTP does not, so the engineering is sound. Whether 6 November 2026 produces a tagged fleet or a shadow one comes down to collection points, cost and political will.

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.

Echizen-gani, the Echizen crab, is snow crab (zuwaigani) landed at ports in Fukui Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast, and has carried a registered geographical indication since 27 September 2018. A geographical indication, or GI, is regional intellectual property: the Japanese scheme, run by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), protects the name of a food whose reputation derives from a particular place, and lets the ministry police imitators.

The labelling order that prompted it

On 24 September 2026 MAFF ordered Echizen Town, Fukui Prefecture, to stop using the GI, under Article 5 of Japan’s 2014 Act protecting the names of specific agricultural, forestry and fishery products. As the party responsible for labelling on furusato nozei portal sites, the town had from at least September 2020 to April 2026 listed products as Echizen-gani when more than half of the raw material was Fukui-landed snow crab of a type that cannot be labelled Echizen-gani. Furusato nozei is Japan’s hometown tax donation scheme: taxpayers send part of their residence tax to a municipality of their choice and receive a return gift, usually local food.

The crab in question is mizugani, a male snow crab caught just after moulting, while the shell is still soft. It is a legitimate product with its own name and its own short season, 19 February to 20 March, against 6 November to 20 March for male crab. Selling it was never the offence; labelling it Echizen-gani was. MAFF also found that several cooperating businesses had put the prefix “Echizen” on mizugani, red snow crab (benizuwaigani) and golden crab (ogonigani) products, unauthorised use of the GI in its own right.

MAFF told Fukui Shimbun that a name carrying only “Echizen”, an old province name, “calls Echizen-gani to mind and is regarded as free-riding on the reputation of Echizen-gani”. Its remedy is prosaic: name a real place, such as the municipality, the landing port or the offshore ground.

A third tag on the crab

Fukui crab already carries tags. Snow crab landed in the prefecture gets a yellow tag stamped with the landing port, the proof that it is Fukui-produced Echizen-gani, and that tag has carried the GI mark since the 2018 registration. Since 2015 a second tag has marked the premium grade, Echizen-gani Kiwami, for crabs of 1.3 kg or more, which the prefecture calls double-tagged.

The IC tag is a third, physically separate tag, and a photograph published by Chunichi Shimbun on 2 October 2026 shows the conventional tag beside the new one. It goes on male crabs of 1.1 kg or more, below the 1.3 kg Kiwami bar, so it covers a wider band of crabs than the premium brand does. The plan surfaced first on 1 October 2026, in Ishida’s answer to a question in the prefectural assembly. “Echizen crab is a regional brand that represents the prefecture,” Ishida told the 9 October press conference. “This case risks affecting not only trust in the furusato nozei system but also the credibility of the regional brand as a whole.”

What “IC tag” probably means

No source names the technology. Fukui Prefecture, Kyodo News, Chunichi Shimbun and NHK all use the Japanese term “IC tag”, or describe a chip read by holding a smartphone to it. The prefecture’s account of the function is narrow: a smartphone gives access to a dedicated page showing the origin and the quality, and the fisher and the landing port can be identified.

What follows is RFID News inference, not a prefectural statement. A tag that an ordinary consumer reads with an unmodified phone and no accessory reader is, in practice, NFC at 13.56 MHz, because that is the only tag technology a stock smartphone can read. Near field communication is the short-range subset of high frequency (HF) RFID built into virtually every current handset for contactless payment, working over a couple of centimetres. A UHF or RAIN RFID tag, used in logistics at 860-960 MHz, cannot be read by a phone without a sled or a dongle. “IC tag” here therefore almost certainly means an HF NFC tag, most likely NFC Forum Type 2 or similar on ISO/IEC 14443, with a URL written to it that opens the prefecture’s page. The RFID glossary covers the bands.

Fukui Prefecture has published no specification. The chip, the NFC Forum tag type, the air-interface standard and the supplier are all unstated. Three questions decide whether this works on a quayside: which tag type it is; whether the data is a URL lookup against a prefectural server, which breaks the moment that page is retired, or written to the chip; and how the tag is fixed to a wet, cold, rough-shelled crab so the antenna survives handling and ice.

A tag on the product nobody was faking

The gap between the remedy and the offence matters. What MAFF punished was labelling on processed and mixed return gifts, where mizugani made up more than half of the raw material and the pack was still sold as Echizen-gani, plus other species whose names borrowed the Echizen prefix. A per-item NFC tag on a whole, large, single male crab does not touch that failure mode: once a crab is picked, mixed and packed, the tag is off the product, and the claim on a portal listing is a line of text written by a municipality.

That is not an argument against doing it. Item-level tagging of whole premium crabs is a sound use of NFC and of food traceability: one high-value unit, and a consumer who already carries a reader. It is just aimed at the top of the size range, and the fix MAFF actually demanded involves no silicon at all.

Read more at https://www.maff.go.jp/j/press/yusyutu_kokusai/chizai/260924.html

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.

Fashion retail was the industry that proved item-level RFID could work at scale, and it remains the sector with the highest adoption rates globally. The combination of high SKU count, rapid stock turn, significant shrinkage risk, and the operational complexity of fitting rooms makes apparel a near-perfect environment for what RFID does best. Understanding how it is deployed across the full supply chain — from garment manufacture through to the fitting room and point of sale — illustrates why the technology has become close to standard in parts of the sector.

Tagging at Source

The most efficient point to apply an RFID tag to a garment is at the factory, before the item is packed. Source tagging, as it is known, means the tag is present from the moment the garment leaves production, enabling visibility at every subsequent stage of the supply chain. The tag is typically either integrated into the hang tag (the card or paper label attached by a string or pin) or sewn directly into the garment as a woven label with an embedded inlay.

Hang tag integration is the most common approach in fast fashion because it is fast and cheap to implement without changing garment manufacturing processes. The UHF inlay is laminated inside the hang tag, which is applied at the end of the production line. The disadvantage is that the tag is removed at point of sale along with the hang tag, ending its useful life. For retailers who want to extend RFID visibility into the post-sale phase — for returns processing, resale, or circular economy programmes — a sewn-in label that survives the sale is more appropriate.

Encoding at source means the EPC on each tag is linked to the specific SKU, colour, and size of the garment in the retailer’s product database. Getting this encoding right and consistent across multiple factories and suppliers is one of the more demanding aspects of a source tagging programme, requiring clear technical specifications, compliance testing, and audit processes.

Distribution Centre Operations

Tagged garments arriving at a distribution centre can be processed significantly faster than untagged ones. Cartons of hanging garments can be read in bulk as they move through tunnel readers on conveyor lines, providing item counts and SKU verification without manual scanning. Discrepancies between expected and received items are flagged automatically for investigation rather than discovered during manual audits days later.

Sortation and routing in the DC can also be driven by RFID data, directing items to the correct put-away location, pick zone, or outbound lane based on the tag read. For fashion retailers managing hundreds of stores with different stock profiles, this level of accuracy in the DC directly affects how well stores are stocked relative to demand.

Store Receiving and Floor Management

When a delivery arrives at a store, RFID makes the receiving process faster and more accurate. Associates wave a handheld reader over delivery bags or scan items through a portal reader, confirming the contents against the expected delivery manifest in seconds rather than manually checking individual barcodes. Discrepancies are identified immediately rather than surfacing as mysterious inventory shrinkage weeks later.

On the sales floor, RFID enables cycle counts that would be impractical with barcodes. A full store count that would take a team of associates several hours with barcode scanners can be completed by one or two people with handheld readers in under an hour. Some retailers run daily cycle counts of fast-moving categories. Others do full store counts multiple times a week. The result is an inventory record accurate enough to trust for replenishment decisions, BOPIS availability, and loss analysis.

Replenishment triggers driven by RFID data are one of the highest-value outputs of the system. When the floor count for a specific size and colour drops below a defined threshold, a replenishment task is generated automatically. The associate goes to the stockroom, finds the item using the handheld reader, and brings it to the floor. The manual cognitive load of knowing what needs replenishing is removed, and stock stays on the floor where it can be sold.

The Fitting Room

Fitting rooms are where RFID delivers some of its most distinctive retail applications. Items taken into a fitting room temporarily disappear from the accessible inventory on the sales floor. Without RFID, a popular size might show as available in the system but actually be sitting in a fitting room cubicle, unavailable for customers on the floor or for BOPIS picking.

RFID read points at fitting room entry and exit allow the system to track which items are currently in use and which have been returned. Some retailers have deployed interactive fitting room mirrors that display the items brought in, offer size and colour alternatives, and allow customers to request different items without leaving the cubicle. These features require knowing exactly what the customer has with them, which requires item-level RFID.

Returned items that should go back to the floor but are instead left in the fitting room represent a direct sales loss. RFID-enabled fitting room management ensures these items are flagged for return to the correct location, maintaining floor availability and reducing the number of items that drift into the sorting backlog.

Loss Prevention

Electronic article surveillance (EAS) using traditional AM or RF hard tags has been standard in apparel retail for decades. RFID-enabled EAS integrates item-level identification with the exit alarm function, meaning that when an alarm triggers, the system knows exactly which item caused it rather than simply recording that something left the store undeactivated. This itemised loss data is far more useful for loss prevention analysis than a simple alarm count, allowing retailers to identify which SKUs are targeted most frequently and adjust their protection strategy accordingly.

At the point of sale, RFID deactivation or removal is integrated into the checkout process. The tag is either killed electronically or the hard tag is physically removed. Either way, the inventory record is updated in real time, and the item transitions from store stock to sold.

Beyond the Store

As circular economy models gain traction in fashion, RFID’s role is extending beyond the first sale. Sewn-in tags that survive washing and wear can identify returned items for resale, support authentication of pre-owned garments, and provide evidence of a product’s history for sustainability reporting. Brands including Mulberry, Ralph Lauren, and several luxury houses have used NFC or UHF tags as a permanent digital identity for garments, enabling consumer-facing features alongside supply chain and retail operations. The tag that starts its life at a factory in Vietnam can still be providing value years later in a resale marketplace or a repair service.

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.

Most people who work with RFID understand it at a practical level: a reader sends a signal, a tag responds, data gets captured. What happens in between is a question of physics, and understanding it properly makes you a better practitioner. It explains why tags fail in certain environments, why read range is not just a function of reader power, and why you cannot simply turn up the transmit power to solve a coverage problem.

How Tags Get Their Power

Passive RFID tags carry no battery. They harvest the energy they need to operate from the electromagnetic field produced by the reader. This is energy harvesting, and it is what makes passive tags cheap, small, and maintenance-free over a lifetime of potentially thousands of reads.

The mechanism differs by frequency. At LF (125 kHz) and HF (13.56 MHz), energy transfer happens through inductive coupling. The reader antenna and the tag antenna behave like the primary and secondary coils of a transformer. When the tag comes within the near field of the reader, the alternating magnetic field induces a current in the tag’s antenna coil. That current powers the chip. This is why HF and LF tags need to be relatively close to the reader — near-field coupling falls off steeply with distance, approximately with the cube of the distance, so doubling the gap reduces power transfer by a factor of eight.

UHF RFID, operating in the 860 to 960 MHz range, works differently. At these frequencies the reader antenna radiates a propagating electromagnetic wave rather than a near-field magnetic field. The tag’s antenna captures a tiny fraction of the energy in that wave — typically microwatts — rectifies it to DC, and uses it to power the chip. This is far-field energy harvesting, and it is why UHF tags can work at distances of several metres rather than a few centimetres. The energy falls off with the square of the distance in free space rather than the cube, which is a much gentler relationship and is why UHF dominates in logistics and supply chain applications where read range matters.

Backscatter: How the Tag Talks Back

A passive tag cannot transmit in the conventional sense. It has no power source capable of driving a transmitter. Instead it uses a technique called backscatter modulation to communicate with the reader.

When the reader is transmitting its carrier signal, the tag modulates its antenna’s impedance — effectively switching between reflecting and absorbing the incoming radio wave. By doing this in a controlled pattern, the tag creates small variations in the reflected signal that the reader can detect and decode. The reader is listening for its own signal coming back, modified by the tag’s deliberate reflections. This reflected and modulated signal carries the tag’s EPC and any other data the reader has requested.

Backscatter is elegant in its simplicity but demanding in its sensitivity requirements. The reflected signal from a tag is extremely weak compared to the transmitted signal — the reader must detect a very faint echo against the background of its own powerful transmission. This is one reason why RFID readers are more complex and expensive than they might appear: the receiver has to pull a tiny backscatter signal out of a noisy environment dominated by the reader’s own output.

Why the Environment Matters So Much

Radio waves interact with everything in their environment. Metal reflects UHF radio waves strongly, which can either help (reflecting energy toward tags that would otherwise be in shadow) or hurt (creating multipath interference where reflected signals arrive at a tag out of phase and partially cancel the direct signal). Liquids, including water, absorb UHF energy, which is why tags on bottles of water or pharmaceutical solutions perform poorly unless specifically designed for the application.

HF tags, operating by inductive coupling, are far more tolerant of liquids because magnetic fields pass through water with minimal absorption. This is why HF RFID is the standard choice for pharmaceutical vials, blood bags, and wet food products, while UHF dominates in dry goods and logistics applications.

Human bodies are mostly water. A person standing between a reader and a tag will attenuate the UHF signal significantly. This is not an academic concern in retail environments where staff and customers move constantly through the read field. Good antenna placement accounts for it.

Polarisation and Antenna Design

Radio waves have polarisation — the orientation of the electric field as the wave propagates. A linearly polarised antenna transmits and receives most effectively when the tag antenna is aligned with the same polarisation. A tag oriented 90 degrees to the reader antenna loses significant read range, potentially becoming unreadable. This is why circularly polarised reader antennas are used in many applications: they radiate energy in a rotating pattern that provides consistent performance regardless of tag orientation. The tradeoff is that circular polarisation delivers about half the power of linear in the optimum orientation, which reduces maximum read range.

Tag antenna design is also highly application-specific. A tag intended for a cardboard box has a very different optimal antenna geometry to one intended for a metal asset or an apparel hang tag. The antenna must be tuned to the dielectric properties of whatever it is mounted on, because those properties shift the antenna’s resonant frequency and affect both energy harvesting efficiency and backscatter performance.

What This Means in Practice

Understanding RFID physics does not require an engineering degree, but it does require accepting that the technology is not magic. Read range is a function of transmitted power, antenna gain, tag antenna efficiency, the environment the signal is propagating through, and the sensitivity of the reader’s receiver. Changing any one of these factors changes the outcome. When a deployment underperforms, the physics usually points directly to which variable is the problem — and that is the right place to start looking.

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 reason it happens at all is that the whole system depends on a machine successfully reading a strip of paper looped around a handle, and paper strips get crumpled, folded under, soaked and torn off. Thirty-nine per cent of mishandling in 2025 happened during transfers, where a bag has to leave one aircraft and find another in under an hour without ever being seen by a human. Here is the journey your suitcase actually takes, and the precise points at which it can slip out of the system’s sight.

The tag is a licence plate, not a record

When the check-in desk prints that long sticky strip, it is not writing your itinerary onto it. It prints a ten digit number, the bag’s licence plate, along with a barcode of the same number, your destination airport code and your flight. The first three digits identify the airline. The rest is a serial.

Everything else lives in a database. Your name, your connection, the aircraft your bag should be on, whether you have actually boarded. The paper does not know any of it. It knows who to ask. This is why a torn tag is catastrophic in a way that a torn boarding pass is not: without that number, a bag arriving at a sorting hall is genuinely anonymous, and staff have to open it and hunt for a name.

Down the rabbit hole

Behind the check-in desk your bag drops onto a belt and enters one of the most elaborate machines any of us regularly use without seeing. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 baggage system runs to roughly eleven miles of conveyor beneath the building, with bags travelling at speeds that would be alarming at eye level.

The first thing that happens is a scan. Not one scanner but an array of them, arranged in a ring so that a barcode facing in any direction has a chance of being seen. If they get it, the bag is routed automatically: through security screening, along the right branch, onto the make-up carousel for its flight, where a handler loads it into a metal container called a unit load device that goes into the aircraft hold.

If they do not get it, the bag is diverted to manual encoding, where a person looks at it on a screen or in the flesh and types the number in. That is the first place time is lost, and on a tight connection, time is the only thing that matters.

The read rate problem

Here is the number that explains most lost luggage. Optical barcode arrays in baggage halls typically read somewhere between 85 and 90 per cent of tags on the first pass. That sounds excellent until you multiply it out. One bag in eight needs human help, at every airport, on every leg.

The reasons are physical rather than clever. A barcode needs line of sight. Loop it around a handle and it curves, which distorts the stripes. Let it fold back on itself under the weight of the bag and it disappears entirely. Wrap the case in cling film at the airport, as many travellers do, and you have added a layer of glare. Soak it in rain on an open apron in Manchester and the ink runs.

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, solves exactly this. An RFID tag is a chip with a printed metal antenna that answers by radio instead of being looked at, so it does not care about orientation, folding, curvature or dirt. It has no battery: it draws the sliver of power it needs from the reader’s own signal. Read rates in baggage trials sit above 99 per cent. Our explainer on why UHF RFID dominates this kind of work covers the physics of that.

So why did it take airlines thirty years?

Because of a problem that has nothing to do with technology. An RFID bag tag costs pennies more than a paper one, and an airline handling a hundred million bags a year is looking at a serious annual cost. The awkward part is who gets the benefit.

Your bag’s most dangerous moment is a transfer, and a transfer usually involves somebody else’s airport and frequently somebody else’s airline. An airline that fits RFID tags to its own bags pays the whole cost while the savings land partly with competitors and hub operators. Everyone waits for everyone else. Economists call it a collective action problem. Aviation called it not this year.

Two things broke the deadlock. The first was Delta Air Lines, which in 2016 spent around 50 million dollars fitting RFID to its own operation across dozens of American airports, on the argument that a bag it could actually see was worth more than the tag cost. It worked, the tracking success rates were widely publicised, and other carriers stopped treating it as exotic.

The second was rules. IATA Resolution 753, which came into force in 2018, requires member airlines to track every bag at four points: when they take custody of it, when it is loaded, when it is transferred, and when it is returned to the passenger. It does not mandate RFID. It mandates knowing, which in practice pushes airlines towards whatever technology makes knowing cheap. Compliance passed the halfway mark across the industry only recently, which tells you how large a lift it has been.

Where it still falls over

Even a fully tracked bag can go astray, because tracking tells you where something is, not where it should be. A bag correctly scanned onto the correct aircraft is still wrong if you failed to board. A bag can be perfectly tracked into a container that misses its slot because the aircraft turns round in forty minutes and the crew ran out of time.

And then there are the days when the system itself falls over. When Heathrow’s Terminal 5 opened in March 2008, staff could not get through security or find parking, bags backed up, and the new baggage system was overwhelmed within hours. Thousands of bags went astray and more than five hundred flights were cancelled in the first ten days. Nothing was technically broken in the way people assume. The machinery worked. The humans and the processes around it had not been rehearsed at full load.

AirTags answer a different question

Plenty of travellers now drop a small Bluetooth tracker into the suitcase, and they are genuinely useful, but it is worth being clear about what they do.

An Apple AirTag or similar does not know where it is either. It shouts a coded identifier over Bluetooth, and any passing iPhone that hears it anonymously reports the location back. In an airport full of phones, that works beautifully. In an aircraft hold at 38,000 feet, or a rural sorting shed at three in the morning, nothing is listening and the location goes stale.

The real difference is who the information serves. Your tracker tells you your bag is still in Amsterdam. The airline’s system tells the airline which flight it should be put on next. For years those two facts sat in separate universes, with passengers standing at a desk insisting their bag was in Schiphol while an agent explained that the system had no record.

That gap has closed. Apple’s Share Item Location feature lets you generate a temporary link showing the tracker’s position and hand it to an airline, and 36 carriers now accept it, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Aer Lingus among them. The link expires after seven days or when you are reunited with the bag. It is a small feature that quietly ended a decade of arguments at baggage desks.

What actually helps

Book longer connections, because transfers are where 39 per cent of mishandling happens. Remove old tags from previous trips, because a stray barcode is exactly what a scanner will read confidently and wrongly. Photograph your bag before checking it, since describing a black four wheel case to a harassed agent is hopeless. Put a paper label with your name and destination inside, which is what staff look for when a tag is gone. And keep receipts for anything you buy while waiting, because delayed baggage expenses are usually claimable.

Frequently asked questions

How often do airlines actually lose bags?

Around 24 million bags were mishandled worldwide in 2025 against five billion passengers, which is fewer than five per thousand. Most of those were delayed and reunited within a couple of days. Permanently lost bags are a very small fraction of the total.

What is the most common cause of a lost bag?

Transfers. Thirty-nine per cent of mishandling in 2025 happened when a bag had to move between flights, usually in a short window and often between different airlines or airports.

Does RFID stop bags getting lost?

It removes the biggest single failure, which is a barcode that cannot be read. RFID tags answer by radio regardless of orientation or damage, pushing read rates above 99 per cent. It does not fix human or scheduling errors, so it reduces mishandling rather than eliminating it.

Should I put an AirTag in my suitcase?

It is genuinely useful, particularly for proving to an airline where your bag actually is. Just be aware that it relies on other people’s phones being nearby to report a location, so it goes quiet in aircraft holds and remote facilities.

What is IATA Resolution 753?

An industry rule in force since 2018 that requires airlines to track each bag at four moments: taking custody, loading, transferring and delivering. It does not specify a technology, but it made airlines invest in knowing where bags are rather than assuming.

What should I do the moment I realise my bag has not arrived?

Report it before leaving the airport and get a property irregularity report reference, since that number is what every later claim hangs on. Give a delivery address, share your tracker link if you have one, and keep receipts for essentials you have to buy in the meantime.

We explain the machinery behind ordinary life, without the jargon. Join the RFID News newsletter, or read more about tracking in logistics and transport.

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.

Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in the Sahel, the semi-arid belt of West Africa along the southern edge of the Sahara, where livestock keeping is a mainstay of rural income and a standing target for organised theft. The campaign was launched alongside three others covering vaccination, deworming and artificial insemination, by Commandant Ismaël Sombié, Minister of State for Agriculture, Animal and Fisheries Resources, and by Dr Amadou Dicko, the minister delegate responsible for animal and fisheries resources.

“L’identification, c’est la base dans tout processus,” Dicko said: identification is the basis of any process. He described the aim as “des outils électroniques qui nous permettront de reconnaître tous les animaux volés, tous les troupeaux perdus,” or electronic tools that will let us recognise all stolen animals and all lost herds.

What goes into the rumen

No Burkinabé source names the device, its manufacturer or its radio specification. The state daily Sidwaya describes only “un dispositif électronique implanté dans la panse,” an electronic device implanted in the stomach, and never uses the word bolus.

An identifier that is swallowed and then stays inside the animal for life is, in practice, a ruminal bolus: a transponder sealed in a dense ceramic capsule, dosed by mouth, which settles permanently in the reticulum, the first compartment of the ruminant stomach. Cattle, sheep and goat boluses are almost universally low frequency RFID devices working at 134.2 kHz under ISO 11784 and ISO 11785, the standards that define the numbering structure and the air interface for radio frequency identification of animals, in either FDX-B or HDX signalling. It is the same family of device used for official sheep and goat identification across the European Union.

None of that is confirmed for Burkina Faso. The ministry has published no standard, no operating frequency, no device model and no supplier, so the description above is what cattle boluses normally are, not what this deployment is known to use. What is clear is why a device inside the animal suits a theft problem: an ear tag can be cut out in seconds, while a bolus cannot be removed from a live animal. That is a theft-first design choice rather than the herd-management logic behind most European animal tagging.

Identification is not location

Dicko said the system would help recover an animal and its herd in a dispute, and the launch coverage talks about recognising lost herds. A passive transponder has no battery, no satellite receiver and no network connection of any kind. It answers only while an energising field from a reader reaches it, and for a low frequency bolus read with a handheld wand that field reaches centimetres, not fields or districts. The Togolese outlet La Cinquième, reporting the launch on 21 September 2026, makes the same point: this is not GPS, and there is no real-time movement tracking.

What the system does do is settle identity once the animal is in front of someone. At a livestock market, a roadside checkpoint or an abattoir, an official with a reader can establish whose beast it is instead of arguing over brands and ear notches. That is genuinely valuable for recovering stolen cattle, and it depends entirely on readers being present where stolen stock surfaces and on veterinary services, markets and police checking the records. Nothing published says how many readers have been bought or where they will go.

Over 2 billion FCFA across four campaigns

The government has put more than 2 billion FCFA behind the four campaigns together, roughly £2.6m or EUR 3.3m, with no breakdown by activity, so the share spent on identification is unknown. The rest of the package is large: vaccination of more than 5 million cattle, more than 5 million small ruminants and more than 18 million poultry against about ten diseases, where earlier campaigns covered four, plus artificial insemination for 100,000 cattle and 15,000 sows. All of it sits under the Offensive agropastorale 2026-2028.

Two West African states, two approaches

Senegal, another West African Sahel state with the same theft problem, has taken a markedly different route. At a national workshop on 23 and 24 December 2025 at Diamniadio, stakeholders validated a costed roadmap for the SNITB, Senegal’s national cattle identification and tracking system, developed with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the UN agency responsible for food security and agriculture. It includes anti-theft committees in all 557 municipalities, and seven young Senegalese companies pitched platforms and connected devices. The FAO announcement named no technology at all: no RFID, no GPS, no platform. Annual cattle theft losses there have been put at 2 billion FCFA, about USD 3.2 million, and by August 2026 the FAO was piloting GPS collars and a tracking app with herders in Kaffrine and Louga.

Burkina Faso has gone straight to rumen identifiers at 300,000 head with no published technology framework in front of it. Both countries sit inside a wider regional effort: an FAO workshop in Dakar put forward a proposed programme against livestock theft for 2026 to 2030 with a budget of more than USD 345 million, a figure still awaiting formal approval that is neither committed spending nor a measure of market size. One account describes it as covering the 15 member states of the Economic Community of West African States, the regional bloc known as ECOWAS, which has been working towards harmonised livestock identification. FAO figures put annual regional losses above USD 467 million, with organised cross-border networks in areas such as Liptako-Gourma and the Lake Chad basin.

What the ministry has not said

Three questions decide whether 300,000 identified cattle will cut theft in Burkina Faso, and none has a published answer:

• Who supplies the devices and the readers, and to what standard are they built?
• How many readers have been procured, and at which markets, checkpoints and abattoirs will they sit?
• Is the identification database a national system, or attached to an existing programme?

On the last point, PRAPS-2, the World Bank’s regional Sahel pastoralism support project, approved in March 2021 and running to 2027 across six Sahel countries including Burkina Faso, has funded digitalisation of pastoral services there. No published source connects this campaign to PRAPS funding, and the ministry has not said where the records will live.

The commercial point is simple. Senegal is still choosing; Burkina Faso has committed to a device category and a volume. Whoever supplies the identifiers and readers holds the clearest early reference position for livestock identification in the region, and the ministry has not said who that is.

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.

Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) sounds simple as a customer proposition. You order on the app, you collect from the shop, you avoid delivery fees and waiting at home. But behind that simple experience is a complex fulfilment operation, and the thing that makes or breaks it is inventory accuracy. If the system says an item is in store and it is not, you have a failed promise, a disappointed customer, and a service recovery cost that erodes the economics of the channel. RFID is the technology that closes that gap.

Why Inventory Accuracy Is the Core Problem

Retailers without item-level RFID typically operate with inventory accuracy figures somewhere between 65 and 75 percent. That means at any given moment, somewhere between a quarter and a third of what the system believes is on the sales floor is either genuinely missing, misplaced, in a fitting room, or recorded in the wrong location. For store replenishment from a backroom, that level of inaccuracy is manageable with some buffer stock and experienced staff. For BOPIS, it is not.

When a customer places a BOPIS order, the system makes a real-time promise based on the inventory record. If that record says three units are available and the actual count is zero, the order confirms, a picker goes to look for it, finds nothing, and the order has to be cancelled or fulfilled from another channel. That failure rate destroys customer confidence in BOPIS faster than almost any other operational failure. Retailers who have studied their BOPIS cancellation rates often find that inventory inaccuracy is responsible for the majority of failed orders.

How RFID Changes the Equation

Item-level UHF RFID brings inventory accuracy to 95 percent or above when implemented correctly. Retailers including Zara, Macy’s, and Marks and Spencer have demonstrated this at scale. The mechanism is straightforward: every tagged item can be located and counted quickly and reliably, which means the inventory record stays closer to reality between formal cycle counts.

With frequent RFID-based cycle counts — some retailers run them daily or even multiple times a day in high-velocity categories — the system knows with much greater confidence which items are actually available. BOPIS availability logic can be built on that more accurate foundation, either by drawing directly from RFID inventory data or by applying tighter availability rules (for example, only offering BOPIS on items where at least three units are confirmed present rather than one).

Beyond accuracy at the point of order, RFID accelerates the pick process itself. A store associate with a handheld RFID reader can locate a specific item in a stockroom or on a sales floor dramatically faster than with visual searching or barcode scanning. In a BOPIS context where customers may be waiting in a collection bay with a two-hour pickup window, pick speed is a real operational metric. Associates who can find an item in two minutes rather than ten are serving more orders per hour and keeping customers satisfied.

The Role of RFID in Click and Collect Infrastructure

As BOPIS volumes have grown, many retailers have invested in dedicated click and collect areas with their own inventory. Some use RFID-enabled lockers or pick-up bays where the customer’s order is physically associated with a specific location. When the customer arrives and authenticates, the correct locker unlocks. RFID ties the physical item to the order record, providing proof of collection and eliminating the manual handling errors that can occur when staff match paper receipts to physical bags.

Ship from store, a related fulfilment model where online orders are picked from store stock and dispatched directly, has the same inventory accuracy dependency as BOPIS. Retailers operating ship from store at scale need to know not just that an item is in the store, but that it is in a condition to be shipped — undamaged, correctly tagged, and accessible. RFID-based inventory management provides the foundation for both the availability logic and the pick process.

Fitting Room and Sales Floor Visibility

One of the less obvious RFID contributions to omnichannel retail is fitting room visibility. Items taken into fitting rooms disappear from the sales floor inventory in a practical sense but may not be recorded as sold or moved in the system. RFID read points at fitting room entry and exit, combined with return rail scanning, can track items through this part of their journey and ensure they are returned to the correct location on the floor rather than left in a back corner.

This matters for BOPIS specifically because a popular item might show as available in the system but be sitting in a fitting room rather than on the shelf. RFID visibility at this granular level allows inventory logic to reflect that distinction and avoid confirming BOPIS orders on items that are technically in the store but practically unavailable for picking.

The Omnichannel Case for RFID Investment

Retailers who have justified RFID investment primarily on inventory management or loss prevention grounds are finding that the omnichannel benefits are equally compelling in the current environment. As BOPIS and ship from store volumes grow as a proportion of total sales, the cost of inventory inaccuracy rises proportionally. RFID is not cheap to deploy at item level across a large store estate, but the ROI calculation for omnichannel retailers increasingly makes the case without needing to count every other benefit separately.

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.

JC Penney’s attempt to deploy item-level RFID across its store network is one of the most discussed cautionary tales in retail technology. The ambition was sound — the US department store chain wanted to use RFID to improve inventory accuracy, reduce out-of-stocks, and streamline replenishment. What followed was a deployment that ran into serious difficulties, ultimately contributing to significant financial losses and a strategic retreat that set the company back years in its technology programme.

What They Were Trying to Achieve

In the early 2010s, JC Penney was under pressure. Competitors were investing heavily in supply chain technology and the gap between perpetual inventory records and actual stock on the sales floor was a persistent problem across the industry. Item-level RFID offered a credible solution: tag every garment, read the tags regularly with handheld or fixed readers, and maintain an inventory accuracy figure closer to 95 percent rather than the 65 to 70 percent that most retailers without RFID were achieving.

The case for the investment was straightforward. Better inventory data means fewer phantom out-of-stocks, faster replenishment from backroom to floor, and less markdown merchandise that was actually sitting somewhere in the store unsold. Macy’s had demonstrated that item-level RFID worked in a department store environment. JC Penney had good reason to pursue the same path.

Where It Went Wrong

The problems that emerged at JC Penney were not primarily technological. The RFID hardware and tag standards were mature by the time the rollout began. The failures were largely operational and organisational.

The rollout was pushed at a pace that outran the organisation’s ability to absorb it. Store staff were not adequately trained on how to use handheld readers, how to interpret the data they produced, or how to act on inventory discrepancies the system revealed. RFID generates information, but it requires process changes to turn that information into action. Those process changes were not embedded before the technology was switched on.

Vendor coordination was another pressure point. Getting consistent, correctly applied tags from suppliers across a product range as diverse as a department store’s is genuinely difficult. Tags applied in the wrong location, incompatible tag specifications, and inconsistent encoding introduced read rate problems that undermined confidence in the data. When staff cannot trust the numbers on the screen, they revert to manual counts, and the investment sits idle.

The rollout also coincided with a period of significant internal disruption at the company, including a widely reported strategic upheaval under CEO Ron Johnson between 2011 and 2013. Major technology programmes require sustained executive focus and stable operational management. JC Penney had neither during the critical implementation phase.

The Financial and Operational Cost

Estimates of the direct cost attributable to the RFID programme difficulties vary, but figures of around $28 million in write-offs and abortive project costs have been cited in retail technology analysis. Beyond the direct spend, the opportunity cost was significant. Years of potential inventory accuracy improvement were lost. The competitive window during which RFID could have differentiated JC Penney’s operations narrowed and eventually closed as the company’s broader financial position deteriorated.

The reputational effect within the business was also damaging. Failed technology projects create scepticism that makes future investments harder to justify and implement. When an organisation has been burned by a large-scale rollout, the appetite for the next one diminishes, even when the next project is properly designed.

What the Industry Should Take From It

JC Penney’s difficulties with RFID are not evidence that the technology does not work in retail. Macy’s, Zara, Primark, and dozens of other retailers have demonstrated conclusively that it does. The lesson is about implementation discipline, not technology viability.

Successful RFID deployments share several characteristics that were absent or compromised at JC Penney. They start with a clearly defined pilot that validates processes before scale-up. They invest as heavily in change management and staff training as in hardware and software. They establish clear data quality standards with suppliers before a single tag is read in a store. And they maintain leadership continuity through the implementation period.

The technology is not the hard part. Embedding new ways of working across a large, distributed retail organisation is the hard part. JC Penney is a useful reminder of what happens when the two are treated as the same problem.

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.

A semi-underground container sits mostly below ground level, with only its upper section and the deposit opening above the pavement, and is emptied by a crane-equipped vehicle. In Senec these containers stand in groups inside a fenced enclosure, known locally as a stojisko, and it is the enclosure rather than the bin itself that the chip opens.

One chip, two doors

The credential is not new. It is the same chip the municipality already issues for access to the zberný dvor, the collection yard where residents take bulky and separated waste. Senec’s waste department enabled the container function for existing holders automatically, so anyone who had one already did not have to visit the office.

Residents without a chip collect one on the spot at the waste department office on the collection yard site on Železničná street, and must be registered for the municipal waste fee to get one. The office opens Monday 07:00 – 14:00 with the yard closed, Wednesday 07:00 – 15:30, Friday 07:00 – 13:00 and Saturday 07:00 – 15:00, and is shut Tuesday and Thursday, with Saturday issues only for chips requested by email during the week. Enquiries go to odpady@senec.sk, 02/2020 5152 and 02/2020 5168. The announcement names no individual official.

Additional chips cost EUR 5.50 each, and the cap on them is the detail worth reading twice: a household may hold no more chips than the number of people it pays the municipal waste fee for. Pay for four people, hold four chips.

The chip is the lock, not the label

Most municipal RFID in waste collection identifies the bin: a tag on the container carries its identity, a reader on the collection vehicle logs each lift, and the record feeds billing. Senec has had that for years. What it has added is a second system pointing the other way, a credential held by the resident and read at the enclosure, deciding whether the gate opens at all.

Tying the number of credentials to the fee register makes that chip closer to an entitlement token than an asset tag: the right to put waste in the container is issued against a payment record and can be withdrawn by the same route. It is pay as you throw enforced at the lid rather than on the invoice. Plenty of schemes identify a container, some weigh it, very few gate physical access to a communal one against who has paid.

Senec publishes no technical detail on either system. No frequency or tag specification appears in the city’s announcements, the procurement notice or the supplier material, so the band in use is not a matter of public record.

The container side: a tender that specified RFID

The bin identification half predates the locks. A tender for mixed municipal waste collection in Senec worth about one million euros, reported on 30 May 2024, required the winning collector to obtain collection data by means of RFID chips, and every mixed municipal waste container in the town already carries one. AVE SK odpadové hospodárstvo was the incumbent collector at that point, and no winner appeared in the publicly visible part of the notice.

Senec reads the resulting disposal data through ESONA, a container tracking system from Slovak supplier MIM. ESONA is described as tagging every container with a unique ID linked to the fee payer and carrying its volume and waste type, with readers on the collection trucks and every emptying logged centrally with date, time, fill level and GPS position for the municipality to view in a web application. The city’s waste officer said that data also forms the basis of the collector’s invoicing. Senec has used it to amend its waste and local fee regulations, and pays annual incentives to households that switch to a smaller container.

Why Senec started locking enclosures

The October 2026 announcement gives no reason for the scheme, but the motives were set out when the first enclosures were locked. A November 2024 report by Slovak broadcaster TV JOJ, quoting deputy mayor Juraj Gubani and waste officer Ivica Gajdosova, gave two: stopping residents of surrounding villages dumping waste in Senec, and ending night-time scavenging by people reselling what they took, which left waste strewn around the enclosures. Senec has more than 190 semi-underground containers, and the first stage covered 38 enclosures, which the broadcaster reported as leaving nearly half the town needing a chip to throw anything away.

The rollout has moved street by street since. At the end of September 2025 the city locked enclosures on J. Jesenského, Bernolákova, Košická, Pribinova and Bratislavská streets on identical terms, including no chip at all for residents who are not registered for the fee. Households are told building by building, with a notice on the door. The Salámka group is the next stage of that programme, not a new scheme.

More municipal schemes are collected in our waste management and access control coverage, and the terms used above are defined in the RFID glossary.

Read more at https://www.senec.sk/aktuality/2026/od-piatka-9-oktobra-2026-sa-uzamykaju-polopodzemne-kontajnery-na-salamke

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.

RFID is frequently positioned as a technology that helps organisations become more sustainable. Reduce food waste through better cold chain monitoring. Cut overproduction through accurate inventory. Extend asset life through better maintenance tracking. These are legitimate benefits, and the evidence for them is real. But the tags themselves have an environmental cost that the industry does not talk about nearly enough, and it is worth examining honestly.

What an RFID Tag Is Made Of

A passive UHF RFID inlay — the kind applied to billions of garments, boxes, and pallets every year — consists of several layers. There is a substrate, typically PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic, onto which a aluminium or copper antenna is etched or printed. A silicon microchip is bonded to the antenna. The whole assembly is usually laminated between additional layers of plastic or paper depending on the final tag format. Some tags also include adhesive backing.

None of these materials are particularly exotic, but the combination of them creates a recycling problem. The chip and antenna are bonded to the substrate in ways that are difficult to separate without specialised equipment. Standard paper recycling processes cannot handle tags embedded in cardboard or paper packaging — the plastic substrate and metal antenna contaminate the paper fibre stream. Standard plastic recycling has the same problem in reverse: the metal and silicon contaminate the plastic.

Scale Makes This a Serious Issue

The Global RFID Journal estimated that around 35 billion RFID tags were produced in 2023, with that figure growing year on year as retail, logistics, and supply chain adoption accelerates. The vast majority of those tags are single-use: applied to a product, read a handful of times through its supply chain journey, and then either left on the product when it is thrown away or stripped off and discarded at point of sale.

35 billion small pieces of mixed-material waste per year is not a trivial quantity. At an average inlay weight of perhaps 0.3 grams, that is around 10,000 tonnes of tag material annually, most of which ends up in general waste or, at best, general recycling streams where it causes contamination rather than recovery.

What the Industry Is Doing

Progress is being made, though it is not yet at the scale the problem demands. Several directions are worth noting.

Paper-based substrates are gaining traction as an alternative to PET film for certain applications. Companies including Stora Enso and Sappi have developed RFID inlays on cellulose substrates that are compatible with paper recycling streams, provided the chip and antenna are removed or sufficiently small. The antenna remains a challenge: even a thin aluminium trace is enough to disrupt paper recycling machinery.

Conductive ink antennas printed using carbon-based or silver-based inks offer a potential route to more recyclable tags. Carbon ink antennas have lower conductivity than aluminium, which affects performance at longer read ranges, but for short-range HF and NFC applications they are a viable option. Several NFC tag manufacturers now offer paper-substrate, conductive-ink inlays specifically marketed for their improved recyclability.

Tag reuse is the most environmentally efficient option where it is operationally feasible. Hard tags used in apparel retail, reusable packaging in closed-loop supply chains, and asset tags on durable equipment can all be recovered and reused across multiple cycles. The environmental calculus here is straightforward: a tag used fifty times has one-fiftieth the per-use environmental impact of a single-use label. The challenge is that recovery and reuse requires a closed-loop system, which is only practical in certain supply chain configurations.

Chipless RFID and the Longer Term

Chipless RFID, which encodes data in the physical structure of a printed pattern rather than in a silicon chip, eliminates the most problematic component of a conventional tag. Several research groups and companies have demonstrated chipless RFID that can be printed directly onto paper or cardboard using standard printing processes. The read ranges and data capacity are currently limited compared to chipped tags, and the reader infrastructure is different from standard EPC Gen2 systems. But the technology is advancing, and a future in which RFID identification can be printed onto packaging that then enters the normal paper recycling stream is plausible within this decade.

A Balanced Assessment

The environmental case for RFID is not straightforward. The tags themselves are a waste problem that the industry has been slow to confront. At the same time, the system-level environmental benefits — reduced food waste, optimised logistics, extended asset life, more accurate production — can genuinely outweigh the tag manufacturing and disposal footprint when deployments are well designed and the resulting data is actually used to drive better decisions.

The honest answer is that RFID is neither an environmental villain nor a sustainability silver bullet. It is a technology with real environmental costs that can, in the right contexts, deliver real environmental benefits. The industry’s job is to minimise the former while maximising the latter, and that means investing seriously in recyclable tag design rather than treating it as a footnote in sustainability reports.

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.

Most of our readers will meet the Digital Product Passport as a deadline rather than an opportunity, which is exactly the framing Nanna Ingemann Dalsgaard thinks will cost them money. As VP of Strategic Intelligence at SML Group she spends her time on the gap between what the regulation requires and what the infrastructure could do, and she is unusually willing to say where the industry is getting ahead of its evidence. We put six questions to her on what item-level RFID does and does not solve for DPP, where the margin actually sits, who owns the accuracy of a passport when a supplier gets it wrong, and whether consumers will ever care. Her answers are published in full and unedited.

Nanna Ingemann Dalsgaard

Vice President, Strategic Intelligence, at SML Group. SML supplies RFID tags, labels, brand identification and Digital Product Passport carriers to retailers and brand owners worldwide, working across RFID, NFC, QR and digital product identity.

The DPP conversation has moved from “where is this product” to “what is it made of, how was it used, and where does it go next”. For a brand that already runs item-level RFID, how much of the DPP problem is already solved, and how much is genuinely new work?

The first thing to be clear about is that RFID and Digital Product Passports are not the same thing. They solve different problems, but they can complement each other extremely well.

RFID has primarily been deployed to give brands visibility of physical products across factories, distribution centres and stores, supporting inventory accuracy, operational efficiency and increasingly traceability. A DPP has a different purpose: it connects a product to a much richer set of information about what it is, what it is made from, how it should be used, repaired or recycled, and potentially what happens to it throughout its lifecycle.

So a brand with mature item-level RFID has not already “solved DPP”, but it has solved an important part of the foundation, which is creating and managing digital identities for physical products at enormous scale.

The genuinely new work is largely around the data behind that identity, bringing together information that today may sit across PLM, ERP, suppliers, sustainability systems and other sources; establishing governance and access rights; and making that information available in the interoperable structure required by DPP.

We, at SML, see RFID and DPP as complementary rather than competing technologies. The opportunity is to build on the item-level identification infrastructure many brands already have and extend it into a broader connected-product architecture.

That is where it becomes more interesting than compliance. Once a trusted digital identity can connect a physical product with reliable information throughout its lifecycle, the same foundation can support supply chain efficiency, traceability, circularity, authentication, resale and new consumer experiences. RFID gives many brands a significant head start. DPP expands what that digital identity can ultimately do.

The Thursday DPP track opens with a session titled “From Mandate to Margin”, which is a bolder claim than most DPP talk. Where is the margin actually, and is there a brand you can point to that has found it rather than just complied?

I think the phrase “from mandate to margin” is important, because the margin does not come from the passport itself. It comes from what you build on top of the product identity and the data behind it.

If DPP is treated purely as a regulatory project, it will primarily be a cost of compliance. But once that digital connection to the product is in place, it opens up several value pools. A connected product can become a direct post-purchase touchpoint with the consumer. It can enable services such as repair, take-back and resale, support authentication and increase confidence in secondary markets. And over time, the data generated across those interactions can help brands understand how products actually move through their lifecycle.

We are already seeing early examples. Green Cotton Group in Denmark has connected Digital Product Passports with its RE-LOVED recommerce model, where published results show that 50% of resale buyers were new customers and 86% of orders combine new and second-hand products.

Other projects involving brands are also exploring how DPP infrastructure can make resale more efficient and potentially allow brands to participate economically in a product’s second and third life. However, I think we need to be careful not to overstate where the industry is today. We have early signals of emerging business models and commercial use cases; we do not yet have years of evidence showing a universal “DPP margin”.

At SML, we encourage brands to think about how compliance establishes the requirement, but it should not define the ambition. If you are going to create the product identity and data infrastructure anyway, design it so it can support future value creation as well. The real shift is from thinking about the product relationship ending at checkout to potentially creating value throughout the product’s lifecycle.

Most of our readers will meet DPP first as a compliance deadline rather than an opportunity. What is the most expensive mistake a brand can make in the next eighteen months while treating it that way?

I think the most expensive mistake would be to build DPP as a standalone compliance project that you later have to rebuild as business infrastructure.

I completely understand why brands initially say, “just make me compliant”. DPP is complex. It touches data that may sit across PLM, ERP, suppliers, sustainability systems and other parts of the organisation, and the regulatory requirements are still developing. That is why I think the focus right now should be on understanding what you already have before deciding exactly what you need to build.

Start with a focused pilot. Understand where your data sits, what is missing, how reliable it is, how products are identified today and how the different systems connect. That gives you a much clearer picture of your starting point and what will actually be required.

This is also where industry experienced solution providers can help reduce complexity. At SML, for example, we approach DPP across the physical and digital layers, from product identification and data carriers through to the digital platform and the connections into a brand’s existing ecosystem.

While you are doing the work, think beyond the immediate compliance requirement. The same product identity and data infrastructure may eventually support richer consumer engagement, authentication, repair and resale, circular services and better lifecycle insight.

So my advice would be to not wait for every regulatory detail to be final. Start now by understanding your data, what you have, where it sits, what is missing and how reliable it is. You do not need all the answers yet, but you need to understand your starting point. The expensive mistake is not starting small. It is starting with something you know you most likely will have to replace.

RFID gives you a serialised identity at item level, which looks like the obvious carrier for a DPP. What are the honest limitations? Where would you tell a brand that a QR code or something else is the better answer?

RFID is extremely powerful for creating a serialised identity and capturing products at scale across factories, distribution centres and stores. The limitation today is at the consumer interface. RFID, which is widely used for item-level identification in apparel, cannot generally be read by today’s end consumers’ smartphones. So while RFID can provide the identity and support the product throughout the supply chain, consumers currently need another way to access the DPP.

That is where QR codes have a very obvious advantage. They are inexpensive, familiar to consumers and can be accessed directly with a smartphone camera. If the primary requirement is simply to give a consumer easy access to a Digital Product Passport, QR may therefore be the most practical answer to begin with.

NFC provides another option. It offers a tap-based consumer experience and is supported by modern smartphones, but it comes with different cost and implementation considerations. For many brands, the answer may ultimately be a combination. RAIN RFID can support high-volume identification and operational use cases throughout the supply chain, while QR or NFC provides an accessible consumer interface to the same underlying digital identity and information.

At SML we work across RFID, NFC, QR and digital product identity, so the objective should not be to push a particular carrier. It should be to design the identification architecture that makes sense for the product and the use cases. The carrier is the doorway. The real value sits in the identity, the data and the services you connect behind it.

A DPP is only as good as the data behind it, and apparel supply chains are not famous for clean data. Who in the chain actually owns the accuracy of a product passport, and what happens when a supplier gets it wrong?

Ultimately, the regulatory responsibility sits with the relevant economic operator, it cannot simply be outsourced to a supplier or technology provider. But the data itself will inevitably come from many different actors across the supply chain.

A mill may provide information about materials, a manufacturer about production, and certification or testing data may come from another party altogether. So data accuracy is not just about collecting information. You need to know where it came from, who provided it and ideally what evidence sits behind it. Suppliers will get things wrong, data will change, certificates will expire and information will sometimes be incomplete. That means brands need processes for validation, correction and governance rather than assuming that everything entering the passport is automatically correct.

For me, this is one of the biggest lessons for brands starting their DPP journey is, do not wait for perfect data before you start. Use the time you have now to understand where the gaps are, establish ownership and start improving data quality, rather than waiting until the requirements become mandatory. Clean data is something you build, not something you are handed.

“Clean data is something you build, not something you are handed.”

Five years out, does the DPP become invisible infrastructure that nobody talks about, or a thing consumers genuinely interact with? Your honest view, not the optimistic one.

Honestly, I think it will be both, but most consumers will probably never talk about a “Digital Product Passport”.

What consumers may interact with is what brands and retailers choose to build around the infrastructure. If the experience stops at presenting the information required for compliance, I think consumer engagement will be relatively limited. People may access it when they need specific information, but there is not necessarily a reason to keep coming back.

The opportunity is that the digital connection to the product does not have to stop there. The experience can evolve throughout the life of the product. A consumer scanning a sweater when they buy it in May could see one experience, while scanning the same sweater in November could provide something different, a new service, a campaign, a styling suggestion, a loyalty benefit or another reason to engage with the brand. That is where I think it becomes really interesting. A physical product can become an ongoing touchpoint between a brand and its customer rather than the relationship largely ending at the point of sale.

DPP is in my view part of that broader connected-product opportunity. Regulation may drive the infrastructure and accelerate adoption, but brands still have to create a reason for consumers to engage with it. So five years from now, I do not think consumers will care about DPP itself. They will care about what it allows them to do.

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.

Tosca is a reusable packaging and pooling business serving food, beverage and fresh produce supply chains, which means its customers rent and return the assets rather than buying them outright. Cabka manufactures pallets and large containers from recycled plastic, and also runs a track and trace service of its own.

The rest of the product detail is generous. The CP 1208 has a 1200 x 800 mm euro-standard footprint for compatibility with euro-size handling equipment, “subject to the requirements of each installation” in the October wording. It is moulded from 100% recycled plastic, an “exclusive blend” in October and a “unique blend” in April, and is more than 4 kg lighter than a traditional wooden pallet. The skid edges are rounded rather than square to cut impact points during forklift handling, deck grooves lock Tosca’s reusable crates in place without strapping for double-stacked transport, and there are top-deck handles, anti-slip features and drainage holes. It is non-porous, splinter-free and easy to clean, unlike the wooden pallets it is pitched against, which need ISPM-15 heat treatment or fumigation under the international phytosanitary standard for wood packaging. The release sells “durability and modular repairability” as the route to a lower total cost of ownership, and names automated storage and retrieval systems as a target environment.

The regulatory framing is explicit. PPWR is the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, which has been directly applicable in all EU member states since 12 August 2026 and replaces the earlier Packaging Directive. It covers transport packaging, pallets included, and from 1 January 2030 at least 40% of certain transport packaging used in the EU must be reusable and part of a functioning reuse system. Laurent Le Mercier, EMEA President at Tosca, said in the April 2026 launch release: “With increasing automation, tighter regulations, and rising sustainability expectations across FMCG and retailers’ supply chains, the demands placed on pallets are evolving.”

What the one sentence leaves out

Set against that level of detail, the RFID line is conspicuous. The published material gives no frequency band, no air interface standard, no chip or inlay, no supplier, no tag count per pallet, no indication of where in the pallet a tag sits, no read range or read rate, no statement of whether tagging is standard or optional, and nothing on whether a tag survives the modular repair the cost case rests on. Plastech’s October 2026 coverage renders the line as “RFID integration is also available”, which hints at an option rather than a fitment, but that is the outlet’s paraphrase and not the release wording.

Cabka’s own track and trace page is no more specific. Read on 12 October 2026, it offers to “track assets using IoT, RFID, BLE or barcode technologies across key touchpoints”, with no band, standard or tag detail. BLE there is Bluetooth Low Energy, an active battery-powered beacon technology and a different proposition from a passive RFID tag, which draws its power from the reader’s field. The page presents them as interchangeable menu items, but they imply very different hardware, costs and service lives.

Band and standard are not pedantry

An operator cannot plan from “RFID integration”. The band and air interface decide which readers work, what dock-door infrastructure costs, how the identifier is encoded, and whether a pallet arriving at a customer site can be read on equipment that customer already owns. For a pooling fleet crossing many sites in many countries, that last point is the whole game. The market convention for returnable transport items in Europe has settled on one dominant approach, and most pooled crate and pallet programmes are built around it, but that is an industry norm and not a published specification for the CP 1208. Neither company has confirmed which band or standard this pallet uses. The RFID glossary covers the bands, air interface standards and encoding involved.

Moulding a transponder into recycled polymer is the hard part

This is the most technically interesting part of the story, and nobody has addressed it. An RFID antenna is tuned to resonate at a particular frequency, and that tuning depends on the electrical properties of whatever surrounds it. Change the material around the antenna and you shift that resonant point, which is called detuning: the tag is still there, but it absorbs less energy from the reader and its read range drops, sometimes to nothing.

Recycled feedstock is variable by nature. Composition, filler content, moisture and carbon black loading all shift from batch to batch, and all of them affect the dielectric behaviour of the plastic. A tag tuned on virgin resin can detune once embedded in recycled resin, and because the variation is not constant, nor is the detuning. One moulding run can read well and the next can read badly. The release even advertises that variability as a commercial virtue, noting that recycled content “reduces dependence on volatile input markets”. Solving the tuning problem across a 100% recycled blend is real engineering, and it is precisely the part nobody has described.

Modular repair versus the asset’s identity

The commercial case for the CP 1208 depends on repairability: damage a block or a component and you replace that part rather than scrapping the pallet. That raises an obvious question about the transponder. If the tag sits in the part that gets swapped, the asset either loses its identity or acquires a new one, and the pooling records that justify the whole reuse system break at that point. Nothing published about this pallet says where the tag sits or what the repair procedure does about it, which is the kind of detail that decides whether an asset tracking programme holds together over years of service.

Reading inside an automated warehouse

The release names automated storage and retrieval systems as a target environment. These are the crane-and-shuttle warehouses that move pallets without an operator, and they are among the harder radio environments in logistics: steel racking, dense stacks, pallets packed close enough that neighbouring tags shadow each other, and no human to re-present a load that failed to read. Tag placement and read rate decide whether tagging works there, and neither has been published.

If the tag carries the compliance evidence

PPWR does not treat a returned pallet as reuse by default. The asset has to operate inside a functioning reuse system, and transport packaging moving between sites of the same or related companies must be reusable and used within one. Extended Producer Responsibility, the principle that the producer carries the cost of a product’s end of life, follows the same logic. Per-asset identification is how a pooling operator shows that a system exists and that assets are circulating in it. If the sustainability story rests on that evidence, the tag is load-bearing rather than a bonus feature, and its specification stops being a product detail and becomes a compliance question.

The fair point is that a pooled, RFID-tagged pallet moulded from 100% recycled polymer is a genuinely interesting piece of engineering. Alex Masharov, CEO of Cabka, said at Fruit Attraction in October 2026: “Our contribution is to turn recycled plastics into durable transport products designed around customers’ operational needs.” None of that is in dispute. It is simply that as at October 2026 neither Tosca nor Cabka has published anything about the part that makes the tracking work. The information may well exist inside both businesses and just not be public, and a specification sheet would answer most of it in a paragraph.

Read more at https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/04/22/3278645/0/en/Tosca-and-Cabka-Launch-New-Circular-Pallet-Setting-a-New-Benchmark-for-Sustainable-FMCG-Logistics.html

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.

Fixed RFID infrastructure handles the heavy lifting in most deployments — dock doors, conveyor read points, retail floor portals. But the handheld reader fills a different role. It puts interrogation capability in the hands of a person who can move through a space, investigate discrepancies, pick to order, or conduct a cycle count in areas a fixed reader cannot reach. Building a mobile app that works well with a handheld RFID reader is a distinct software discipline, and it is worth understanding what makes the difference between a mobile RFID solution that staff actually use and one that gets left on the charging rack.

Understanding the Hardware Landscape

Handheld RFID readers broadly fall into two categories. The first is a purpose-built mobile computer with an integrated UHF RFID reader module — devices from Zebra, Honeywell, and Chainway are typical examples. These run Android and give you a full-featured computing platform with a keyboard, display, barcode scanner, and RFID reader in one unit. The second category is a sled or accessory reader that clips onto a standard smartphone or tablet. Zebra’s RS series and the Socket Mobile attachments follow this pattern.

The choice of hardware matters for software design. Purpose-built devices tend to have dedicated trigger buttons that your app needs to handle correctly. Sled-style readers communicate over Bluetooth or a device connector and have their own SDK. Know your target hardware before writing a line of code, because the RFID API you write against is device-specific even if Android is the common layer underneath.

Connecting to the Reader

Most handheld RFID reader SDKs expose a similar set of operations: start inventory (begin reading), stop inventory, configure power level, configure session and target, and receive tag read events. The specifics differ by manufacturer. Zebra devices use the EMDK (Enterprise Mobility Developer Kit) which provides a robust Android library. Chainway and other brands typically provide their own SDK with similar capabilities but different class structures and event models.

A key design decision is whether to use continuous inventory mode, where the reader runs until told to stop, or a trigger-based mode where a single press initiates a timed read cycle. For cycle counting, continuous mode is usually preferable. For picking or item verification, a single trigger read with immediate feedback is cleaner. Build your UX around the workflow, not the other way around.

Handling Tag Read Events

A handheld reader in a busy environment will generate a lot of read events very quickly. Even at modest settings, a UHF reader can return hundreds of EPCs per second. Your app needs to handle deduplication correctly. Reading the same tag fifty times in a single inventory cycle should register as one item, not fifty. Maintain a set of seen EPCs for the current session and filter duplicates before updating the UI or sending data to a backend.

RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) values attached to read events are useful for proximity applications. If your use case involves locating a specific item within a space, RSSI gives you a directional signal: stronger reads mean the tag is closer to the antenna. This is the principle behind “find mode” features in retail RFID apps, where the screen intensity or an audio tone guides an associate toward a specific item.

UX Principles for Warehouse and Retail Environments

Mobile RFID apps are used in demanding physical environments. Users are often wearing gloves, working in low light, moving quickly, and giving the screen a fraction of their attention. Design accordingly.

Limit the information density on any single screen. A cycle count screen should show the count in progress, the expected count, and a clear visual indicator of match or discrepancy. An associate at a dock door does not need to see individual EPCs scrolling past — they need a clear green or red signal. Reserve detailed data for supervisor-level views or post-session review.

Large touch targets and high contrast are not optional in warehouse environments. Small buttons work on a desk. They fail when you are holding a reader in one hand and the device in the other, in a cold store, with gloves on. Test your UI with actual users in the actual environment before you sign it off.

Offline Capability and Data Sync

Wi-Fi coverage in warehouses and retail stockrooms is rarely perfect. A mobile RFID app that fails gracefully when connectivity drops is table stakes. Store session data locally in a SQLite database or equivalent, sync to the backend when connectivity is restored, and handle conflict resolution sensibly if a session is completed offline and synced later.

The sync architecture matters more than many developers initially expect. A cycle count session that captures ten thousand tag reads needs to be transmitted efficiently. Compress where possible, batch reads into summary payloads rather than sending individual events, and build retry logic that does not require user intervention.

Integration with Backend Systems

The app is only as useful as what happens to the data it collects. Integration with WMS, ERP, or a dedicated RFID middleware platform needs to be designed from the start rather than bolted on at the end. REST APIs are the standard approach for most modern deployments. Define your data contracts early — what does a completed cycle count payload look like, what does the backend return, how are exceptions flagged — and build to them. This is also where understanding the EPC encoding scheme used in your deployment matters: the app needs to parse EPCs into meaningful identifiers before sending them upstream, not leave that translation to the backend.

Done well, a mobile RFID app is one of the most visible and frequently used parts of an RFID deployment. Done poorly, it is the reason the deployment fails adoption even when the underlying infrastructure works perfectly.

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.