RAIN RFID is a quickly growing market. With more than 21 billion tags shipped in 2020, new use cases in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and shipping and logistics are being developed every day.
As RAIN continues to grow in popularity, it will become more and more important to standardize certain practices in order to avoid potential issues.
One of these concerns is “tag clutter.” When the data on a RAIN tag is not uniquely and properly formatted during the encoding process, it may be difficult to filter your tags for your application from others’ tags. Stray reads from improperly encoded tags is otherwise known as tag clutter.
For example, if a postal service that uses RAIN tags for asset tracking is transporting a shipment of retail products, which are also tagged with unrelated RAIN tags from the manufacturer, there is potential for a duplicate number to appear on each item. In some situations, RAIN readers may become overwhelmed by unrelated tag reads, delaying or interfering with data collection. Properly encoding a number helps your system focus on the RAIN tags critical to your application — and discern which ones to ignore, should the situation arise.
To combat tag clutter, the RAIN Alliance is promoting encoding best practices that will ensure businesses are able to easily and reliably identify, locate, and authenticate their items, including introducing a new standards-based numbering system. This new numbering system is easy to use, ISO-based, and ISO-approved.
We are asking RAIN Alliance members, partners, and other responsible RAIN users to commit to appropriate encoding using a standards-based numbering system, including the new RAIN Alliance ISO numbering system. (You can learn more about other methods here.)
Proper encoding is important to the success of further RAIN deployments — yours, and others. As RAIN continues to expand, it will be increasingly important to be a good RAIN neighbor by ensuring data integrity and avoiding issues like tag clutter.