From the automotive and textile industry to pet and luggage tagging—the range of RFID applications is growing. LANXESS, for example, now has work uniforms with integrated RFID transponders. The chips ensure that every employee receives the right clothes when these are returned from the cleaners. To exclude the possibility of personal data being collected without the employee’s knowledge, the transponders are activated only in the laundry center.

The benefits of automated data collection via radio are already becoming apparent in the logistics sector. In the past, for example, merchandise arriving at a retailer’s central warehouse had to be individually registered and counted at the ramp. The items were then compared with the bill of lading, after which all data would be entered manually into a computer. Now, however, RFID chips can do all this completely automatically—provided, of course, that RFID readers are installed at the warehouse loading bay. As soon as a pallet equipped with RFID transponders passes such a loading bay, the crates on it are recognized through their radio signals and registered in the merchandise management system. Within just a few seconds, all items on the pallet have been registered, which saves a lot of valuable time and also helps prevent inventory management errors.