With its new board of directors elected, and following six months under the leadership of CEO Aileen Ryan, the RAIN Alliance has organized a set of strategies to further the global adoption of UHF RFID technology, branded as RAIN. The organization’s key goals for 2023 include a communication and engagement initiative with Asian markets, education in Europe regarding the advantages of the less-used upper ETSI RF band, and encouraging the use of a RAIN Alliance-sponsored numbering system to help closed-loop RFID tag users screen or filter out external tags.
In April, the Alliance elected four new members to its board (see RAIN Alliance Elects Board of Directors), including director Jonathan Aitken, who also leads digital partnerships at Avery Dennison. Incumbent board members include Ralf Kodritsch, NXP Semiconductors‘ segment manager of RFID solutions, Juho Partanen, Voyantic‘s co-founder and director of business development, and newly elected Pierre Muller, EM Microelectronic‘s RFID business unit manager. Now, Aitken says, the Alliance is looking forward to furthering technology growth and adoption.
The organization has undergone some changes in the past year. For one thing, Ryan was named its president and CEO in October 2022 (see RAIN Alliance Names New Leadership), and she says she and the organization share a mission to expand connection with RFID companies into Asia, as well as to support regulatory changes underway around the world. The Alliance’s initiatives are focused around four pillars, Aitken says: boosting adoption of UHF RFID technology, elevating awareness of the RAIN brand, optimizing ease of deployment and use, and driving sustainability.
That last category encompasses two different efforts. One is the use of RFID tags to make products more sustainable, while the other involves making the tags more sustainable as well. “We are tying all of our efforts to those pillars,” Aitken states. As part of these efforts, Ryan explains, the non-profit organization has been offering webinars and courses, such as a recent tire master class in Germany, as well as a webinar focused on the Asian market.
Engaging with the Asian Market
Following the travel restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted the entire world, especially Asia, the Alliance is now focused on what it describes as reengaging the Asian community. “Like every organization,” Ryan says, “it has been hard for the RAIN Alliance to get out and to connect with members, because of the travel situation.” That’s something the organization intends to rectify, she adds. An Alliance webinar held in April focused on the Asia Pacific region, with speakers from technology companies presenting deployments and solutions in use throughout that area.
Aileen Ryan
One presenter was Avery Dennison, which described a solution it provided to Disney Shanghai to track the food supply chain for quick-serve restaurants. The technology enables Disney to manage a food-safety control system based on freshness, which tracks products’ batch information, expiration dates and shelf life at the central kitchen that serves outlet restaurants. Avery Dennison’s food-traceability solution includes UHF RFID tags and readers, along with its management software to capture and digitize product information to ensure food safety.
Chinese company Xindeco IoT described its solution leveraging RFID tags for managing data regarding lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries for electric vehicles. The company expects battery demand to increase at a rate of 33 percent annually before 2030. Xindeco’s solution uses on-metal RFID tags applied to lithium batteries that can be read to digitally capture data. In that way, RFID can spare workers from trying to scan barcodes that might be obscured, and that can only store a limited amount of data.
Arizon RFID, based in Taiwan, presented its visual RFID tags designed to help individuals locate specific tagged items. The tags use energy from RFID interrogation signals to illuminate an LED light. In India, meanwhile, Ecartes Technology offers an RFID solution for the banking sector, based on tracking paper files that move around multi-story buildings. With RFID zone-based reader gates, ceiling readers and handheld devices, the solution enables files to be located within a matter of inches.
In addition to hosting the webinar, the RAIN Alliance intends to attend the International IoT Exhibition (IOTE), to be held in Shenzhen in September, and it plans to visit with member companies in Japan later this spring. Throughout the pandemic, Ryan says, innovation was underway in Asia and worldwide, and now there’s an opportunity for these businesses to share the results of their efforts.
“The companies that really dug deep on their digital transformation,” Ryan states, “were the ones that thrived through the pandemic, and we see that played out in Asia just as well as everywhere else in the world.” The RAIN Alliance continues to engage with its six-member Asian Advisory Board to help companies in that region reach what she calls “the economies of scale that enable the industry to move forward and grow.” She adds, “We’re developing a global community, so we’re all learning from each other.”
Left to right: Jonathan Aitken, Ralf Kodritsch, Pierre Muller and Juho Partanen
Use of Upper ETSI Band in Europe
In Europe, the RAIN Alliance continues its efforts to amplify its message related to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)’s upper band, recently introduced at 915 to 920 MHz. The U.S.-based Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s UHF band covers 902 to 928 MHz, providing some shared bandwidth with the new ETSI frequency band. The upper ETSI band has not yet been widely adopted, in part because it isn’t accepted in every country. Germany and the Netherlands, for instance, only permit the standard 870 to 876 MHz band.
However, Aitken notes, the upper ETSI band provides several advantages, including allowing greater power at up to 4 watts, versus the 2 watts of the lower band. In addition, he says, with fewer devices using the band, it is less cluttered, while still offering the advantage of overlapping with the FCC UHF spectrum. To reach other industries and applications, the Alliance continues to host webinars and classes, and it created a two-day master class at the Tire Technology Expo 2023, held in March in Hanover, Germany.
CIN Numbering System to Reduce Tag Clutter
Going forward, the RAIN Alliance plans to focus on a new offering: its Company Identification Number (CIN) system for RFID tags. The numbering system is designed to address a potential issue based on tag reads, as tag numbers could be duplicated. While many companies employ the GS1 and ISO numbering standards, some with closed-loop supply chains do not, and their tag ID numbers could potentially clash with or duplicate those from other businesses in their vicinity, if they end up in the same environment.
The RAIN Alliance has developed an optional numbering system, Aitken says—not to replace ISO or GS1, but rather to help companies that use their own numbering system to ensure a unique ID for every tag. RFID tags come with a memory bank that includes the 16-bit protocol control bank. As such, the RAIN Alliance offers to provide users with a RAIN prefix and a RAIN number, and to concatenate the two to uniquely identify each tag, even if other tags use the same TID number.
In the future, the organization may look at how to support those striving to meet the Digital Product Passport goals legislated in Europe (see E.U. Digital Passport Workgroups Launching Circular Economy Efforts, AIPIA Congress Reveals Impacts of New Digital Product Passport and IoP Journal Launches Digital Product Passport Survey), as well as electronic waste legislation in Europe. “I think the RAIN Alliance, with its new leadership, is really exploring all options,” Ryan says, adding that there are “a lot of things that we have interest in.”
The Alliance’s challenge, Ryan explains, is to remain focused on the immediate obstacles and opportunities. Aitken agrees, stating, “There are lots and lots of ideas, no shortage of ideas, just a question really of corralling people who are interested in those topics to start working on them collaboratively.”
Key Takeaways:
- The RAIN Alliance is working with its Asian membership to expand the organization’s global outreach.
- With new board members and six months under the leadership of Aileen Ryan, the Alliance’s focus is on further educating and guiding RFID adoption.