- Companies are tracking the flow and management, as well as servicing of their assets used at conferences, weddings and other sites, with and RFID tags
- Georgia Expo is the first drapery company applying RFID tags to their rental products, when ordered, during manufacturing, to help others downstream keep track of their drapes
The business of running conferences, weddings and formal events relies on temporary assets: from furniture to cameras, flooring to drapes. And it’s often the task of the rental company to ensure the right items are in the right place and are being properly cared for.
One of the largest drape manufacturers that make these assets used at events, Georgia Expo is equipping its drape panels with UHF RFID tags so that their customers can uniquely and automatically identify them. Georgia Expo partnered with RFID solutions provider Easy RFID Pro to give their drapes and backdrops a digital identity via an RFID tag, said Amanda Gray, sales and marketing VP at Georgia Expo.
The application of UHF RAIN RFID is intended to aid their customers in recognizing and identifying the high value drapes as they move from one site to another.
Tracking Assets
Georgia Expo’s drapes in fact, go all over the country. “We sell to different industries,” Gray said, which includes audio visual and production companies, trade show decorators and business events.
Easy RFID Pro launched in 2019 as a spinout from Party Time Rental, to offer their event rental company customers with an easier way to keep track of the products they use and then return them, said Darren Morizet, president and founder of Easy RFID Pro.
The RFID company offers readers, tags or tagging, as well as software, for use around the country. Through the pandemic, much of that rental equipment was the temporary tents used outside hospitals or other locations for testing and vaccinations. Today, it includes a wide variety of equipment.
Georgia Expo
Among the product manufacturers Easy RFID Pro works with, Georgia Expo is the first drape company in the rental industry to undertake RFID tagging. Georgia Expo attaches and encodes tags from Easy RFID Pro for products in which the customer asks for RFID tracking.
Georgia Expo makes its drapes in Suwanee, GA, with about 25 sewers on staff. All the drapes are sewn to order using millions of yards of specialized fabrics. The pipe and drape company ships out over 100 orders a day. Currently, they only provide the RFID tags when specifically requested, although Gray added that in the future, she could envision the tags being included with every product as a value-add.
Most customers, however, haven’t started using RFID yet as “it’s such a new technology for this industry,” she said. “Our customers are in the early stages of researching RFID and how it can work with their whole company” across many kinds of assets.
Easy RFID Pro Fills Need for Digital Tracking
Morizet has been in the event rental business for several decades with Party Time Rental, and over the years he recalled he “had looked at RFID [for asset management] and everything I looked at was just crazy expensive for a company to adopt.”
Later he revisited the technology, researching companies that sell RFID tags, readers and solution software. “There just wasn’t a solution that was able to out-of-the-box meet my needs as a party rental company.”
With a technology background himself, Morizet felt challenged to develop his own solution. So in 2018 he started developing the software and then late 2018 provided it to Party Time Rental. At a conference he recalled talking to another industry member who said “so, does that really work?” When Morizet proved that it did, the colleague said “‘Will you sell it to me?’ and I said ‘well I haven’t thought about how I would price it, but sure’.”
That company became the first RFID customer in 2019. The original version of the software was client server based, but as Easy RFID Pro expanded to more customers, it became a cloud-based solution to make it scalable.
How it Works
Easy RFID Pro provides the full solution to its rental company customers. That includes passive sticker-type tags which Easy RFID Pro manufacturers itself, as well as handheld and fixed-portal readers that it resells, and the solution software to manage each RFID tag read event.
There are several ways it can be used, Morizet explained. Companies with RFID handheld readers can capture what tagged products they have in their warehouse with staff members powering on the reader and walking through the space. The software then displays the goods associated with each tag on the handheld device. Users can also install a fixed reader at the door so that each item on its way into the warehouse, and on its way back out, can be identified automatically.
That inventory data can then be updated digitally. In that way they can confirm the right items are being pulled for the right order, and that specific items are onsite and ready to be shipped to a customer.
Tracking Laundering and Servicing
When it comes to rental drapes, the supply chain can be complex as they are moved around the country, in and out of warehouses, put to use in a variety of settings, inspected and then moved on to another site. Often several drapes or drape panels must be paired with another that is the same shade, size and quality.
Typically, drapes get laundered less frequently than other assets such as linens and table coverings—every five to 10 events, depending when they are found to be dirty. Easy RFID Pro chose to produce its own tags for the wide variety of assets that would need to be tagged. The company’s goal is to work with manufacturers like Georgia Expo to apply the tags themselves.
“Some tent manufacturers jumped on board first and Georgia Expo kind of came shortly after that,” said Morizet. They have customers that will be using the RFID in the drapes.
The company also just filed a patent on an RFID tag that can be attached to a polyfold chair. The tag can fold in with the folding seat of the chair. “And once it’s on there, it’s a permanent thing—you have to break the tag to remove it from the chair,” said Morizet.
Tracking Service and Laundering
One set of customers Easy RFID Pro serves is using the technology to ensure the accuracy of their inventory counts of equipment or assets in their warehouses.
“One of the challenges we all have in linen and drapery is shade variations,” Morizet said. Workers can use the system to ensure the items they are pulling match the order, and that the items have a similar amount of wear on them.
A drape or linen tablecloth that is three years old and has been washed numerous times, may also look very different than one that is new. “For certain jobs, maybe that doesn’t matter, but for other jobs maybe that does,” he said. “So our software can distinguish the shade variations,” as well as how old the item is and how often it has been laundered.
Furthermore, the software can track rewash cycles thereby enabling companies to make more intelligence-based decisions about servicing. Washing drapery is a big expense and sometimes it takes place more often than necessary. For instance, if it was laundered, but a stain didn’t come out, previously it might just be redirected to run through laundry again.
“It was very difficult to track how many times that was done and where do you stop on the process and say the stains not coming out,” Morizet said. They may have washed an item twice and the company policy is two times and then dispose of it. With the technology and RFID tag reads “they can track the lifecycle of the item, as part of the process.”
Easy RFID Pro’s solution also will track the number of laundering events based on when the tag was read and where. That can be accomplished with handheld readers, even by staff at the laundry. “By using mobile [readers] we allowed them to have a lower cost of entry point,” he said.
Tracking Event Sites
Another way people are using the software is to follow the entire cycle of the item, to the event, and back onto a van, through any servicing.
“They’re giving these [reading] devices to their delivery teams and their pickup teams so that they can scan it on site and know when it was delivered,” he explained. The software identifies the location based on the device’s GPS, along with the time of scan so they know physically where on the property this equipment was delivered.
In that way, they can identify if there are any errors underway or conflicts. “That makes sure that the user knows what was on the order was what indeed they took off the truck,” said Morizet.
The same process could then be completed during pickup of the items at the end of the event.
Boosting Communication
The app enables workers at the event site to communicate with the warehouse ahead of schedule. Warehouse workers could see in the software not only if a drape was picked up, for instance, but what its status was, whether it was wet or dirty, or if it had a stain on a corner.
In the near future, Easy RFID Pro is also offering third-party integrations to allow data to be shared with other apps’ features such as order fulfillment services.
Transporters or drivers also can use the software to enter notes, and upload status details for those who will be handling the drape panel next. At the warehouse, “by scanning [the tags] the warehouse staff knows what to do with the equipment as soon as it arrives, without any further dialogue,” said Morizet.