Ed. Note: A version of this article originally appeared at IoP Journal.
Aug 02, 2021One of the largest radio frequency identification technology companies in Brazil is iTAG, which develops RFID solutions and implements them for its customers. iTAG now uses those same systems to manage the tags that it supplies to clients worldwide, in order to boost its quality, agility and efficiency. In interviews conducted with Sérgio Gambim, iTAG's CEO, as well as some of his employees, IoP Journal recently detailed the firm's success story with its technology. A full report is available in a video recorded in Portuguese, which can be viewed at IoP's Journal TV channel.
Tens of millions of RFID tags are prepared each month for iTAG's customers at its bureau in Braz, São Paulo's historic district, which gained notoriety in the late 19th century due to the immigration of Italian workers who started the nation's process of industrialization. In the region of São Paulo, a business center in Brazil offering goods from all around the world, iTAG began its journey.
iTAG now uses its RFID technology to manage its own inventory.
These days, iTAG has clients the size of Havan, one of the largest retail companies in the country, as well as other national and foreign brands in the clothing, wholesale, retail, manufacturing and logistics sectors, among others. With so many customers and a growing volume of labels to be processed, iTAG was faced with a challenge similar to those it typically solves for its clients: locating, tracking and forwarding goods with 100 percent accuracy.
Boxes containing rolls of virgin tags, which come from suppliers of labels with RFID inlays, now arrive at the bureau properly identified via radio frequency identification. The blank labels are intended for specific customers and are encoded with the respective Electronic Product Codes (EPCs) required for use on the products of each business served by iTAG. The RFID encoding and the printing of barcodes or QR codes takes place in printers used by iTAG, manufactured by multiple companies.
Once the bureau's work is finished, iTAG needs to forward the tags from one Havan to another, from one Levi's to another, and so on. When the company was dealing with a few million tags per quarter, that process was simpler. Currently, however, the risk of a tag box being forwarded to the wrong customer has motivated the firm to use RFID for its own production processes and the management of its supply chains and logistics.
iTAG's gains from the use of its own RFID system are focused on streamlining inventory management, as well as eliminating manual work and errors in its label receiving, production and shipping processes. "We receive RFID tag boxes from our suppliers in a simple and agile way, without wasting time," Gambim states. "We also locate the tags we need without any major difficulties using RFID readers, which are the same ones we offer to our customers. At the end of the process, we were able to streamline the shipment of recorded and printed tags without major complications and no errors."
Sérgio Gambim
With more than a dozen projects awarded by GS1 Brasil and other organizations, as well as an IoP Journal Award in 2020, iTAG has become one of the companies that most often deploys RFID technology in Brazil. The firm maintains bureaus in several Brazilian states and in other countries, such as China, and it seeks to serve customers where new needs arise, such as providing labeling products to Asian factories for tracking and managing goods during manufacturing and throughout the supply chain.
In addition, iTAG invests heavily in software development. "Our systems have already accumulated more than 7,000 hours of development," Gambim reports, adding that the company has an aggressive roadmap of new evolutionary stages of its software solution planned during the coming months. "In the next phase, we will introduce a version that will allow business executives from iTAG's client companies to manage and approve business operations via their cell phones."
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gambim notes, iTAG also felt the effects of the crisis that impacted its customers. The company overcame those challenges well, however, and it acquired a dozen new customers in the past year, he says. "This year, we are back on the growth track," Gambim states, "and there are no shortage of companies asking for information about RFID and quotes for the use of our systems." This is proof, he says, that even in critical situations, hard work with professionalism offers opportunities to prosper—even during a pandemic, and even in a country with complexities like those faced by Brazil.
