The Growing Adoption & Benefits of RFID Technology & Solutions in Supply Chain & Logistics with FEIG Electronics

The Identify Podcast, hosted by Justin Starbird and powered by FEIG Electronics, takes a deeper dive into RFID and the industries it benefits, interviewing experts from FEIG Electronics as well as trusted partners and integrators on topics related to RFID technology, trends, and innovation in this fast-moving space.

In this episode, “The Development and Benefits of RFID in Logistics”, Justin sits down with Jason Warschauer, Director of Technical Solutions at FEIG, to explore the growth, uses, and benefits of RFID in the logistics industry.

The use of RFID has evolved significantly in the past 20 years. Early adopters, such as large box stores, simply used RFID as an expensive way to track pallets leaving and entering docks. Due to the high cost of tags, equipment, and infrastructure, as well as a minimal understanding of RFID capabilities, the technology was slow to take off.

Today, more understanding, intelligent application development, and lowered costs result in a growing adoption of RFID technology and solutions.

Companies like FEIG Electronics, with a 50-year record of excellence and experience, are continuously working to develop upgraded and innovative complete RFID solutions to further increase business opportunities and efficiencies.

“RFID has always been a source of data collection,” explains Jason, “but now having the opportunity to make actionable decisions with that data opens many new doors.”

Thanks to lower costs of adoption and implementation, RFID is shining a light on many new opportunities and benefits.

With manufacturers incorporating RFID into product design and products being tagged at the item level, companies see a bigger picture. New data now has the ability to show the movement of products from manufacturer’s docks all the way through the supply chain, including overseas shipping, to dock doors and onto shelves.

Not only does RFID offer traceability, but the technology also allows for an improved consumer experience. With products tagged on shelves, companies are able to see products in real-time, allowing them to determine location, availability, stock, and even expiration, aiding in the highest levels of inventory management.

With broader applications, modern-day intelligent data handling provides the supply chain and logistics industries, among many others, with previously unthought-of benefits. Utilizing the massive amounts of instantaneously and continually available data, companies are now compiling advanced insights and recognizing unforeseen areas of improvement.

In a previous episode of The Identify Podcast, “RFID Uses & Benefits in the Healthcare Industry from Two Leading Solution Providers, FEIG Electronics Inc. and HID,” Debbie Greenway, EVP of Sales at FEIG ELECTRONICS, remarks on the added benefits of automatic data collection. “Every time we get someone using RFID,” Debbie points out, “they accomplish what they set out to do, whether it’s authentication or document tracking, et cetera, but they always come back and say that they got a side benefit of understanding their processes better. The data becomes automated and continuously comes in. When they take a minute to look at their data, they’re like, “Wow, we have all this inventory over here and not enough over there, or this area is backed up all the time, and that one has free space.’ This data allows them to easily rearrange their processes and increase their efficiencies and satisfaction.”

However, “one of the worst mistakes you can make,” Jason points out, “is throwing that data in your customer’s lap and saying, ‘Here’s all your data. Good luck!’ Being able to take that data and massage it and put it together in a way that tells a meaningful story is key to having a successful solution.”

That’s where FEIG’s integrators, partners, and network come in. 

“At the end of the day, FEIG Electronics is a manufacturer of RFID hardware,” Jason points out. “We have partners that are tag manufacturers who can make every type of tag for every type of application, but it also takes a system integrator to get the software and the filtering put together correctly so we can deliver a complete solution to the customer that’s going to work for them and provide them their data and dashboards in a way that’s going to work for their application.”

Along with lowering costs and intelligent data management, a growing understanding of RFID is also aiding in advancing the technology.

“Customers come to us and say, “We tried RFID 10 years ago, and it didn’t work. We tried this implementation over here, but it didn’t work.’ There’s this preconceived notion I’ve found that when you say the word RFID, automatically, people focus on UHF, Gen2, RAIN, and RFID. They focus on a single product. The truth of the matter is that many different technologies and frequencies fall under the RFID category—we have low frequency, high frequency, and ultra-high frequency. It’s important to understand that even though ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID is the most recent technology to be introduced and, therefore, the most recognized and widely adopted, it’s not always the right technology for every application. Here at FEIG, we can look at their application and say, ‘That’s an HF application, or that’s a low-frequency application, and solve their problem.”

Just as they did over the past 20 years, RFID technology and solutions will continue to grow and evolve, as will the ways in which the world utilizes them.

“Just about everybody’s phone now has NFC built in. That’s high-frequency RFID.” Jason points out. “Everyone with NFC in their phone is walking around with an RFID reader in their pocket, and we don’t even realize it!

“We’re already using it for contactless payments, access control, or to transfer information from one person to another just by touching our phones together. Now that more companies are putting RFID tags on their products, there’s a huge opportunity for consumer interaction and personalization with those products. People can validate the supply chain themselves or validate the right medication at the right time. The technology will become much more interactive in my mind, and it will also become more cohesive.”

To learn more about the current benefits of RFID in the logistics industry and what Jason believes RFID can do in the future, listen to “The Development and Benefits of RFID in Logistics” live on The Identify Podcast today!