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.