Mar 08, 2023RFID Journal, the leading source of news and in-depth information regarding radio frequency identification (RFID) and other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, has unveiled the finalists for this year's RFID Journal Awards. The winners will be announced at RFID Journal LIVE! 2023, the company's annual conference and exhibition, which will be held on May 9-11 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.
"The projects nominated this year have been complex and large-scale, demonstrating how RFID and IoT solutions have become the technology of choice for mission-critical applications," says Debbie Hughes, RFID Journal's senior editorial director of events. "The finalists hail from all around the world, including Belgium, Brazil, El Salvador, Germany, Norway, Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and Turkey, and we're excited to have several of them speaking at LIVE! 2023, where they will share their experience with attendees."
End-user companies were nominated in six categories. The finalists for each category are listed below:
Best Retail RFID or IoT Implementation
- C&A Services GmbH, which added RFID to all stores throughout Europe to optimize and align the customer experience, standardize and simplify processes, provide customer benefits due to increased stock-data accuracy, and ensure merchandise availability and visibility.
- Lojas Renner, which deployed RFID to improve its product replenishment from stock room to sales area, optimize processes involving deliveries of up to 20,000 items per day at each store, and boost inventory count accuracy and frequency.
- Siman Group, which improved its inventory accuracy by 65 percent, while minimizing the amount of time employees spend searching for items among its more than 350,000 constantly rotating stock-keeping units, as well as improving the overall customer experience.
Best Healthcare RFID or IoT Implementation
- AZ Sint-Maarten Hospital, which improved its logistic processes and its management of more than 15,000 medical materials (such as beds, wheelchairs and blood pressure devices), by localizing its medical materials and furniture in real time, then forwarding data to its enterprise resource planning system.
- Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust, which improved the utilization and traceability of its existing fleet of equipment, enabling it to avoid investing in new assets it didn't need, via a hybrid solution combining passive UHF RFID and active Bluetooth Low Energy infrastructure.
- Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, which implemented a multifunctional passive RFID architecture for its entire institution, as well as for collaborative use, allowing the same readers to be applied to different use cases, thereby reducing costs for future deployments.
Best Manufacturing RFID or IoT Implementation
- Pilkington Brasil, a car glass manufacturing company that uses returnable metallic racks to supply products to automakers, which implemented RFID to determine how many active metal racks it had in its inventory, manage the flow of those racks among customers, and reduce container shrinkage and attrition.
- SEKISUI Aerospace, which is using RFID to track shipments of single-use tooling between two of its production facilities, and has expanded that technology deployment sitewide, with the goal of improving operational efficiencies and boosting the on-time delivery of its products.
- Vestel International, which deployed RFID to track a wide variety of products, such as home appliances, electronics and computers, in order to prevent unplanned downtimes, as well as measure costs, productivity and efficiencies through a real-time equipment tracking process.
Best Supply Chain/Logistics RFID or IoT Implementation
- Empresa Brasileira de Correios e Telegrafos (Brazil's postal system, the USPS's counterpart), which transports, processes and delivers millions of postal items throughout Brazil's national territory, and now uses RFID to automate the tracking of large volumes of cargo, enable additional monitoring points and replace an existing barcode-based system.
- Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, which uses RFID to improve its accountability and operational efficiency, and to comply with a U.S. Department of Defense Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness mandate to know where government assets are located in real time.
- U.S. Marine Corps Logistics Command, which utilizes RFID technology to monitor a large inventory of diverse equipment, as well as improve its inventory management and accountability, and prepare for an imminent Department of Defense-mandated audit.
Best Use of RFID or IoT in a Product or Service
- AmerisourceBergen, which leveraged its position as a wholesaler and RFID technology provider to create the AB Medication Tray, by which products come pre-tagged to reduce the need for pharmacy personnel to manually tag medications, while eliminating third-party costs and complexity.
- Halden Kommune, which attached an RFID tag to every waste bin in its municipality, with trucks using UHF RFID readers, 4G connectivity and GPS to document the number of bins emptied, and to enable accurate invoicing and counter households claiming they had not been visited when they had.
- United Parcel Service (UPS), which transitioned from manual to automated scanning with wearable RFID technology, and which instrumented its vehicles with RFID readers that enable customer pickup scans as smart packages are loaded onboard, along with other visibility options.
Best RFID or IoT Implementation (Other Industry)
- Avon and Somerset Police, for its Dementia Safeguarding Scheme, an IoT-based solution designed to reduce the number of people living with dementia who were reported as missing, as well as safeguarding them in public settings and allowing citizens to assist them by contacting next of kin.
- CPC Corp., a petroleum, natural gas and gasoline company in Taiwan, which deployed a custom solution to enable automated management of its filled drums as they are received, weighed and shipped to refineries or other production sites, and to maintain a record indicating the warehouse location in which each drum was stored, along with the weight of every drum and pallet.
- Enea Operator, a power company and the fourth largest energy group in Poland, which improved its warehouse processes by building a self-service counter warehouse based on RFID technology, thus boosting security, availability, convenience and reliability at its facility, using stationary and mobile readers for the identification of products.
Best New Product
The judges also selected nine finalists for the best product being exhibited at this year's LIVE! event. The finalists for 2023 are:
- Advanced Card Systems' Walletmate ACS Mobile Wallet NFC Reader, which is certified by Apple and Google to work with their respective protocols.
- Avery Dennison Smartrac's AD TexTrace Soft Fabric label, based on a recycled textile substrate with an integrated woven antenna and a small loop inlay.
- Bluebird's HF550X RFID reader, which encompasses a smartphone form factor with RFID reader and NFC functionalities.
- HerdX's Smart Reader, a configurable, Bluetooth-enabled solution for meshing multiple units, with no hard-wiring or additional tech investment required.
- InPlay's NanoBeacon Bluetooth Low Energy SoC IN100, designed to eliminate the need for software programming.
- PervasID's Mobile Ranger system, a passive RFID tracking technology with a smart distributed antenna system and signal-processing techniques.
- Powercast's Ubiquity RF Power Transmitter, designed for both wireless charging and two-way communication.
- Reliance RFID's Find-it-Anywhere real-time locating and tracking system, which leverages UHF RFID, BLE, Wi-Fi, GPS, cellular and satellite technologies.
- RF Controls' Overhead EPC Long-Range Encoder, designed to write EPC codes directly to UHF RFID tags without the need for handheld devices.
RFID Special Achievement Award
In addition, RFID Journal is pleased to present the 2023 RFID Special Achievement Award to Mark Roberti, the company's founder and editor. In 2022, Mark retired after 20 years' of educating companies about radio frequency identification and other Internet of Things technologies (see The Wind of Change, Connections and Recollections, and On Mark Roberti's Retirement), so that he could spend more time with his family.
Since retiring, Mark has launched a consulting firm, RFID Strategies, to help end-user companies deploy RFID successfully, and RFID firms to market their products more effectively (see RFID Journal Founder Launches Consulting Firm). For two decades, Mark has recognized other individuals at RFID Journal LIVE! events for their body of work. Now it's Mark's turn to be honored, and the entire RFID Journal team congratulates him for his extraordinary contributions.
This year's RFID Journal LIVE! event will showcase tags, readers, software and services from a variety of manufacturers. Nine industry-specific and how-to tracks will cover how RFID and IoT technologies are being used in retail and apparel, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, the food chain, and inventory and warehouse management, as well as business drivers beyond inventory accuracy, the fundamentals of RFID, and how to integrate RFID into a manufacturing line. LIVE! will also offer fast-track RFID Professional Institute certification training, and attendees will see the latest innovations from more than 80 exhibitors hailing from 26 countries. For more information, see Registration Now Open for RFID Journal LIVE! 2023.
