News

Impinj providing chip-based serialization for item-level tagging

February 15, 2012

RFID provider Impinj has launched a chip-based EPC serialization method to give brand owners the flexibility to decide when, where and how they manage the item-level tagging process across their global supply chain.

Monza Self-Serialization, according to a company press release, is an easy-to-deploy, reliable and scalable serialization method that provides the benefit of optimizing for the lowest total applied tag cost and addresses many of the critical challenges faced by brand owners as they scale up source tagging operations to meet the growing number of retail item-level RFID initiatives.

Item-level tagging requires brand owners to attach an RFID tag or ticket that has been encoded with a unique Serialized Global Trade Item Number (SGTIN) to items they produce. For brand owners, item-level serialization requires the integration of complex serial number management systems for the coordination, distribution and synchronization of serial numbers across their entire global supply chain, including internal manufacturing locations, distribution centers and third-party contract manufacturers.

Today, brand owners have a choice between implementing and administering their own IT-based serialization systems or outsourcing serial number management to one or more qualified third-party service bureaus. These options for implementing or outsourcing serialization may force brand owners to change their business processes in ways that increase costs or decrease their supply chain responsiveness and flexibility. Monza Self-Serialization generates a unique SGTIN serial number directly from each tag chip, dramatically simplifying serial number management while giving brand owners more choices in how to deliver properly tagged products, said Jay Craft of Jeanswear's, a retailer using the system.

"Chip-based serialization was a very attractive concept to VF Jeanswear, but there were still a few key questions on our minds," he said. "The cycle time assurance that comes with Monza Self-Serialization allows us to design a solution that we know will meet our long-term needs, while retaining the flexibility to use more than one serialization method in our operations."

With Monza Self-Serialization, the unique SGTIN serial number is generated from the unalterable Tag Identifier (TID) contained in every Monza 5 tag chip, William Colleran, Impinj's president and CEO, said in the release.

"We developed Monza Self-Serialization in response to the clear customer demand for a large-scale, cost effective item-level tagging solution," he said. "The combination of Monza tags, Impinj STP high-speed encoding systems, and now Monza Self-Serialization, enables brand owners and tagging solution providers to deliver reliable and flexible serial number management and tag encoding solutions at much lower cost than alternative solutions."

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