SATO and EM Microelectronic Reshape the Possible with the Synergy of RAIN and NFC Technologies

EM Microelectronic and SATO Corporation announced that SATO’s range of RAIN RFID and HF printers — the CL4NX and CL6NX Plus industrial and CT4-LX desktop printers — designed for retail, healthcare, and smart industrial applications can now natively print and encode em|echo-V RAINFC labels.

The landscape across retail, industrial and healthcare is undergoing a shift. In retail, customers look for hyper-personalized experiences and omnichannel purchase journeys, while brands grapple with agile supply chains and the looming Digital Product Passport. The move for the “smart” industry is the optimization of production flows, digitalization of data and regulatory compliance documents and ease of access to these documents. Healthcare faces a similar crossroads while compiling patient safety, personalized care, with operational efficiency, and proposing remote therapies for chronic diseases, all while battling staff shortages.

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology, has seen an increased adoption in those markets, with retail leading the way. RFID uses radio waves to wirelessly identify objects by accurate reading of multiple tags simultaneously, eliminating the need for line-of-sight scanning, contrary to the barcode or QR code technology.

Two RFID technologies are used for different objectives, based on the operating frequency.

RAIN RFID operates in Ultra High Frequency (UHF) at 860-960 MHz and allows for longer read ranges using printers or readers. RAIN excels in supply chain management due to its long-read range using UHF frequencies. This enables accurate stock tracking, agile supply chain operations, and error prevention through automation. The market figures confirms that:

RAIN RFID yearly growth from 2022 to 2023 of 32% with a total of 44.7 billion chips shipped in 2023.

NFC technology, operating in the High Frequency (HF) range, at 13.56 MHz, leverages the ubiquity of smartphones for a shorter but highly accessible read range. This makes it ideal for B2C applications and allows for a shorter reading range, typically just a few centimeters, with high accessibility through smartphones. This makes it ideal for customer (or patient)-centric services, maintaining a direct dialogue between customers and brands, or patients to their remote therapies.

RAIN RFID-based labels register B2B product interactions. NFC-based labels register customer engagement with products. However, there is no correlation between RAIN and NFC-registered product interactions resulting in a gap between product traceability and product customer engagement. This is where the holistic product view breaks. As the date and place of product purchase are not associated with NFC “taps”, the brands cannot easily identify in their supply chain the specific product that sparked the customer’s interest.