Global branded packaging company r-pac International Corp. has commercially released an ultrahigh-frequency RFID cap tag for tracking inventory and authenticating bottled or foil-wrapped products. The tag was developed to take advantage of foil wrappers, as well as the fluid stored in a bottle, in order to extend the read range up to 15 feet or more. The product is said to be ideal for bottled spirits and wines.
Luxottica Group, a global luxury sunglass and eyeglass company, reports that it has improved quality, as well as the efficiency of its receiving, quality-inspection and subsequent re-stocking of returned products, by between 30 and 50 percent, by deploying a Near Field Communication RFID system. The solution employs an NFC dangle tag attached to each frame, and software that enables workers to view data about the item, and to update its status via NFC-enabled tablets.
The results of the 2014 GS1 US Standards Usage Survey show that apparel and general merchandise manufacturers and retailers are using item level electronic product code-enabled radio frequency identification to enhance inventory visibility and respond to consumer demands for omni-channel options.
Cosmetics company Sephora is rolling out a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon solution to provide content related to a shopper's proximity when that customer uses Sephora's app on an Apple iPhone. The beacon system is slated to be rolled out to all of the company's stores following a pilot of the solution that began in the fall at two San Francisco-area sites. The retailer has not indicated the timeline for the installation rollout. The beacons and content-management software are being provided by Gimbal.
In 2014, organizations were caught off guard by the increase in advanced threats targeting vulnerabilities within business-critical applications running on SAP platforms. Everything from malware being loaded up on RFID devices and being inserted into the manufacturing process, to high-risk "denial of service" vulnerabilities are challenging organizations to re-think their current approach to protecting critical data.
German casual apparel company Marc O'Polo has adopted a radio frequency identification solution to track its products across the entire supply chain, from its distribution center to 86 of its stores throughout Europe. The company finished installing the system at all 87 sites by September 2014, and is now expanding the deployment to include the tagging of products by manufacturers, thereby enabling the retailer to track its merchandise from the point at which they are made.
You'd be forgiven for missing the most important development in RFID, or for dozing off if you did spot it. But earlier this month, GS1 announced the Tagged Item Performance Protocol (TIPP), a new approach to testing tags that simplifies life for retailers, suppliers and tag vendors, and ensures that tags will really work in the field.
Standards group GS1 US has released its Tagged-Item Performance Protocol (TIPP), a guideline that includes a scale for grading the performance of EPC ultrahigh-frequency RFID tags when used on specific products and in specific environments, as well standardizing the testing conducted to identify that grade.
Item-level intelligence requirements spur the growth of RFID across sectors such as industrial, manufacturing, retail, transportation, security, healthcare and consumer applications. RFID has quietly crossed the chasm exhibiting a stable - yet still innovative - market. So what will drive the market in 2015?
The University of Southern California housing office knew its housing facilities, on and off campus, had upwards of 60,000 pieces of furniture and appliances. But until the student housing office deployed a radio frequency identification system, tracking which items were at what locations, as well as which were broken, missing or due for replacement, required exhaustive manual inventories. Those inventory counts, typically conducted during summers, required the hiring of temporary workers and many hours of labor to catalog what was where.