Edson Perin
One of the Brazilian largest radio frequency identification technology (RFID) companies is iTAG, which develops solutions, implements them in its customers and now uses the same systems itself to control the tags the company will supply customers all over the World, with more quality, agility and efficiency. In interviews with Sergio Gambim, iTAG’s CEO, and some of its employees, IoP Journal detailed iTAG’s success story with iTAG technology. It’s worth checking the full video report (in Portuguese), at the IoP Journal TV Channel.
Tens of millions of RFID tags are recorded each month for iTAG’s customers at its bureau in Braz, the historic district of São Paulo city, which began to gain notoriety in the late nineteenth century, with the immigration of Italian workers who started the process of industrialization in Brazil.
In the region of São Paulo, which is a beating heart of business in Brazil, with goods from all over the world, iTAG began its journey, which today has clients the size of Havan, one of the largest retail companies in Brazil, and other important national and foreign brands in the sectors of clothing, wholesale, retail, manufacturing, logistics, among others. To learn about other iTAG success stories, including Havan’s, type iTAG in this site’s search engine (the icon is a hand magnifying glass), at the top of the page, just below the full banner, in the right corner.
With so many customers and a growing volume of labels to be processed and also already processed in its stocks, iTAG was faced with a challenge that is very similar to what it is used to solve for its customers: locating, tracking and forwarding goods with index 100% hit. Thus, the boxes with rolls and rolls of virgin tags that come from their suppliers of labels with RFID inlays today arrive in their bureau properly identified by radio frequency systems.
The blank labels are intended for specific customers and are encoded with the respective EPCs (Electronic Product Codes or Electronic Product Codes) required for use on the products of each of these companies served by iTAG. The RFID encoding and printing of barcodes or QR Codes takes place in RFID printers used by iTAG and manufactured by several companies that supply this type of equipment.
Once the bureau’s work is finished, iTAG needs to forward the tags from Havan to Havan, from Levi’s for Levi’s, and so on. When the company was dealing with a few million tags per quarter, the operation was simpler. Currently, however, the risk of a tag box being forwarded to the wrong customer has motivated the company to also use RFID for its production processes and management of supply chains and logistics (Supply Chain Management).
iTAG’s gains from the use of its own RFID system are focused on streamlining its inventory management, eliminating manual work and errors in the label receiving, production and shipping processes. “We receive RFID tag boxes from our suppliers in a simple and agile way, without wasting time. We also locate the tags we need without any major difficulties, using RFID readers, which are the same ones we use on our customers”, explains Gambim, CEO of iTAG. “At the end of the bureau process, we were also able to streamline the shipment of recorded and printed tags, without major complications and no errors”.
With more than a dozen projects awarded by organizations such as GS1 Brasil and IoP Journal Award too, with SIG Combibloce UpperBag success cases, in 2020, iTAG has been one of the companies that most deploys and popularizes operations with RFID technology in Brazil. With bureaus in several Brazilian states and in other countries, such as China, iTAG seeks to serve its customers where new needs arise, such as labeling products in factories in Asia, for tracking and control from manufacturing and throughout the entire supply chain. supplies.
In addition, iTAG invests heavily in software development. “Our systems have already accumulated more than 7,000 hours of development”, argues Gambim, revealing that the company has an aggressive road map of new evolutionary stages of its software solution planned for the coming months. “In the next phase, we will introduce a version that will allow business executives from iTAG client companies to control and approve their business operations through their cell phones”, adds the entrepreneur.
Gambim also said that last year, the first year of the pandemic, the company felt the effects of the crisis that impacted some customers, but that it overcame the challenges well. This year, showing a table with a dozen new customers who have just been conquered, the CEO of iTAG said: “this year, we are back on the tracks of growth and there is no shortage of companies asking for information about RFID and quotes for the use of our systems”.
A proof that, even in critical situations, hard work with professionalism has opportunities to prosper. Even in a pandemic. Even in a country with complexities like Brazil.
