RFID technology has seen a remarkable transformation in recent years. Once celebrated as a universal bearer of hope, it is used for specific applications today. Especially in the automotive industry, where Schreiner ProTech offers tailored RFID solutions, attention is focused on unique challenges and opportunities. The question is what development the utilization of RFID has seen and above all: where is it headed?

A few years ago, the vision of tracking every single component by means of RFID inspired huge enthusiasm. Today, the automotive sector is using the technology in much more targeted ways, attaching increasing importance to collaboration. The close cooperation between OEMs, tier 1 suppliers, and RFID label suppliers has proven particularly successful. This collaboration ensures smooth integration, high quality, reliability, and optimized production costs. Katharina Totev, Product Manager RFID at Schreiner ProTech, explains the benefits of such collaboration: “The automotive sector is seeking to use increasingly smaller and powerful RFID labels to enhance the efficiency of the process around the vehicle components. Even so, seemingly low-cost labels delivering inadequate performance are frequently used in the field, which leads to additional work and costs.” That is why it is important before any application to check if the label is suitable for the relevant substrate and whether its readability has been adequately tested.

For instance, the installation of marked component assemblies into preassembled car bodies puts special demands on the readability of the labels. That is where the label experts from Schreiner ProTech come into play. Their solid professional knowledge about RFID use cases on or near metal is indispensable in projects like that. With coordinated collaboration on all levels there is nothing that gets in the way of successful RFID integration.

In total, RFID technology offers huge potential to the automotive industry. It enables faster and simpler reading processes, stores data directly on the chips, and makes real-time tracking of the entire manufacturing process possible. These benefits significantly optimize production planning and control. If, on top of that, automation of the industry progresses across the board the excitement about RFID might be rekindled—and soon the saying could be: Automotive Goes RFID!