When the new Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel opened this month in
Vancouver, British Columbia—just in time for the Winter Olympics—it served as
the showcase for a smarter radio frequency identification (RFID) system that is
tracking its 10,000 employee uniforms and 25,000 bathrobes, towels,
tablecloths, sheets and other linens. All 35,000 textiles in Fairmont's real-time
inventory have now been made smarter by having Fujitsu WT-A511 RFID tags sewn
into them.
"In both the hotel and the garment rental industries,
you've got literally hundreds of garments going in and out of facilities everyday,
and right now a lot are using bar codes, which have to be laboriously scanned
in one at a time," says Dan Dalton, director of new product development at
Fujitsu Frontech, which markets
the company's smarter technologies in the United States. "We are at the
beginning of a whole new marketplace—hotels, uniform rental services, tuxedo
rental services, cleaning services of all types—where 50, 100, even 200
garments can be scanned at the same time."
Whether it’s clean stacks of freshly pressed linen or
crumpled hampers full of soiled laundry going out to the cleaners, Frontech
North America (Foothill Ranch, Calif.) has custom-designed its RFID tags with a
sophisticated UHF antenna that allows the scanning of all garments
simultaneously. Software provided by Fujitsu partner Foundation Logic Systems
(Woodland Hills, Calif.) keeps track of which soiled garments have been sent to
cleaners, then matches them up with incoming cleaned garments, providing a list
of which items are missing.
"The Fairmont
said that even in their first laundry load, they had lost articles, which they
were able to recover because of the RFID tags," says Dalton.
"RFID gives a significant return on investment by saving time, saving money
and increasing reliability."
In Japan,
Fujitsu has been designing RF antennas for years, for everything from cell
phones to satellites, giving it a leg up on designing an antenna that could be
enclosed inside an under-2-inch-long rubberized casing using a very soft, very
durable material with just the right RF range to allow its reader to scan whole
hampers.
"One of the things that Fujitsu is very, very good at
is RF antenna design,” Dalton
explains. “It is our intellectual property in the UHF antenna that makes the
tag work so dependably. It can be read at many different angles; it doesn't
have to be flat to the reader."
Fujitsu's RFID tags are designed to last longer than a
garment’s average lifetime—about 200 washings or 50 dry-cleaning cycles—and to
withstand temperatures of 250 degrees Fahrenheit for drying and 400 degrees
Fahrenheit for manual ironing and uniform-pressing machines.
