Here are two key lessons, as reported by Mike Celentano during the recent Brand-Protection Packaging Forum:
• Vendor selection. “There are plenty of vendors out there making tags in various form factors. The same with equipment. We conducted preliminary qualification studies, tested our packaging, and ran it through both our labs and vendor labs to gather some readings on what our potential success might be. We narrowed the field, coordinated vendors for additional testing, and put together protocols. Ours was not an out-of-the-box solution.”
• Label trials and tribulations. “We excitedly waited for our first set of RFID labels to arrive in our packaging department. It’s not inexpensive to do this. When our engineers went to mount the labels on our labeling equipment, they noticed something funny—each label had a little perforation through the center of it where the RFID chip pushed through the paper label. It turned out the rollstock was wound too tight.
“The supplier backed down on the tensioner and sent us another set of label rollstock with the RFID tags embedded. This second set looked great, but as our engineer moved the web to the packaging line, the entire roll unwound like the world’s largest paper telescope. That was two down. Like the story with the three bears, the third time the supplier got the web tensioning just right.”
