RFID Supply Chain Traceability & Anti-Counterfeit
RFID Supply Chain Traceability & Anti-Counterfeit
SeekSoft SCT gives every item a serialised GS1 identity, records every movement as an EPCIS 2.0 visibility event, and lets anyone — inspector, partner or consumer — prove a product is real in under two seconds.
RFID supply chain traceability is the practice of giving every item, case and pallet a unique serialised identity — a GS1 SGTIN or SSCC written to a RAIN RFID tag — and recording a standards-based EPCIS visibility event each time that identity is observed. Because every event answers what, when, where and why, the resulting chain of custody is complete enough to authenticate a product, isolate a recall to a single batch, and prove to a regulator exactly where goods have been. Anti-counterfeit capability comes from pairing that record with cryptographic tag authentication, so a cloned code fails verification even when it looks identical.
Problems We Solve
The traceability and brand-protection failures that large, multi-tier supply chains run into every quarter.
Our Solutions
Twelve interlocking capabilities — from GS1 number allocation to consumer authentication — delivered as one platform.
GS1 Identity and Serialisation
We allocate and manage your GS1 identifiers (GTIN, SGTIN, SSCC, GLN and GRAI) from one central pool, with randomised serial numbers that counterfeiters can't guess. Each plant and contract manufacturer gets its own quota with alerts before it runs out, every location gets a GLN, and every number issued is logged for regulators and customs.
Learn More →Item-Level RAIN RFID Tagging at Line Speed
We qualify the right inlay for each product with an RF site survey, then encode, verify and reject faulty labels inline at production speed. On-metal, high-temperature, cryogenic and laundry tags are available, EPCs are locked so they can't be rewritten in the field, and dual labels pair the RFID inlay with a printed DataMatrix.
Learn More →Aggregation and Packaging Hierarchy
RFID tunnels and pack stations link item to inner, case, pallet and container automatically and check the count against what each pack should hold. Short packs, over packs and stray serials are caught before sealing, DCs and depots can disaggregate and repack under control, and partners who can't read items still get verified pallet data.
Learn More →EPCIS 2.0 Event Repository
A GS1 EPCIS 2.0 repository that captures and serves all five event types (object, aggregation, transaction, transformation and association) with the standard CBV vocabulary. Partners query it through REST APIs in JSON or JSON-LD, each sees only the data they're allowed to, and events are stored append-only with cryptographic hashes so they can't be quietly changed.
Learn More →Cryptographic RFID Tag Authentication
Gen2v2 tags with ISO/IEC 29167-10 AES-128 challenge-response prove each item is genuine at the reader, and NFC tags generate rolling codes so a copied URL stops working on second use. Keys are diversified per tag and held in an HSM, tamper-loop tags report a broken seal, and covert taggants can add another layer.
Learn More →GS1 Digital Link and Consumer Verification
One GS1 Digital Link QR per item carries GTIN, batch, serial and expiry and routes each scan to the right place: POS for Sunrise 2027, EU Digital Product Passport, authenticity check, recall notice, safety data or warranty. Consumers see whether the item is genuine and if it's been scanned before, and you get first-party scan analytics.
Learn More →Warehouse and Dispatch Automation with RFID
Four-antenna dock portals read a whole pallet in one pass, work out which way it's moving and check it live against the ASN, with a red, amber or green light for the operator. Reads from neighbouring lanes are filtered out, exceptions are handled with handhelds, and it connects natively to SAP EWM, Oracle WMS, Manhattan and Blue Yonder.
Learn More →Retail and Last-Mile Traceability
Serialised items stay traceable once they reach the store: full-store counts take minutes, staff find items and check shelf availability, and exit points know exactly which SGTIN left unsold. Ship-from-store and BOPIS stock is accurate enough to promise online, and returns are checked against the serial that was actually sold.
Learn More →Diversion and Grey-Market Analytics
AI models watch scan locations and timings to flag stock appearing outside its territory, transit times that are physically impossible, duplicate serials and scans of batches that should be dead. A diverted lot can be traced back to the distributor it was shipped to, and evidence packs are ready for legal, customs and marketplace takedowns.
Learn More →Recall and Chain-of-Custody Forensics
Trace forward and back across the full chain in seconds, so a recall covers only the affected serials instead of a whole production lot. Lineage is kept through blending, filling and repacking, a batch hold is pushed to partners, POS and the consumer QR at once, and exports include the critical tracking events regulators ask for.
Learn More →Pharma Serialisation Compliance
One serialisation system covers India's Schedule H2 QR codes, DGFT iVEDA reporting for exports, US DSCSA EPCIS exchange and EU FMD. It handles artwork data and online print verification for the H2 QR, coding at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, saleable-returns checks and suspect-product investigations.
Learn More →Cold Chain and Sensor Traceability
Temperature and shock readings travel inside the EPCIS events of each serial, not in a separate system. Battery-assisted passive tags and BLE loggers feed pallet or carton data, shelf life is modelled from mean kinetic temperature and cumulative exposure, and you can see which carrier held the goods when a breach happened and quarantine them automatically.
Learn More →Standards & Frameworks Covered
Complete specifications, protocols, and data structures covered per asset.
GS1 Identifiers
- •GTIN & SGTIN (item + serial)
- •SSCC (logistic unit)
- •GLN & SGLN (party, location)
- •GRAI / GIAI (returnable, individual assets)
- •GDTI, GSRN, LGTIN (batch/lot)
EPCIS Event Types
- •ObjectEvent — observe, add, delete
- •AggregationEvent — pack, unpack
- •TransactionEvent — PO, despatch advice
- •TransformationEvent — input lots to output
- •AssociationEvent — asset & sensor pairing
Data Carriers
- •RAIN RFID — EPC Gen2v2 / ISO 18000-63
- •NFC — ISO 14443, NTAG 424 DNA (SUN)
- •GS1 DataMatrix & GS1-128
- •GS1 Digital Link QR (ISO/IEC 18975)
- •SSCC-18, ITF-14 shipper marks
Regulatory Frameworks
- •CDSCO Schedule H2 QR (India)
- •DGFT iVEDA multi-level export coding
- •US DSCSA enhanced drug security
- •EU FMD, ESPR Digital Product Passport
- •FSSAI recall, GDST, FSMA 204
GS1 Identity and Serialisation
Item-Level RAIN RFID Tagging at Line Speed
Aggregation and Packaging Hierarchy
EPCIS 2.0 Event Repository
Cryptographic RFID Tag Authentication
GS1 Digital Link and Consumer Verification
Warehouse and Dispatch Automation with RFID
Retail and Last-Mile Traceability
Diversion and Grey-Market Analytics
Recall and Chain-of-Custody Forensics
Pharma Serialisation Compliance
Cold Chain and Sensor Traceability
How It Works
Six interlocking steps — from GTIN serialisation to consumer authentication — powered by SeekSoft SCT.
Serialise
Every trade item receives a GTIN and a unique serial to form an SGTIN; every logistic unit receives an SSCC. Numbers are issued from one governed pool across all sites and co-packers.
Commission
The identity is written to a RAIN RFID tag and printed as a 2D code at the print-and-apply station, then read back and verified before the pack moves on. Failures are voided, never shipped.
Aggregate
As items enter a case and cases enter a pallet, tunnel readers build the parent–child tree and check it against the pack specification. Short packs are held before the carton is sealed.
Capture
Dock portals, handhelds, tunnels and partner systems record each observation as an EPCIS event carrying what, when, where and why — drawn from the GS1 Core Business Vocabulary.
Share
Events are published to trading partners and regulators over EPCIS 2.0 REST APIs in JSON or JSON-LD, scoped so each party sees exactly the data they are entitled to and nothing more.
Authenticate
Field inspectors challenge the tag cryptographically; consumers scan the Digital Link QR. Both answers draw on the same event history, so a cloned code fails even when the print is perfect.
Barcode, QR and RAIN RFID Compared
Most programmes use more than one carrier. The question is which job each one is doing.
| Capability | 1D Barcode (EAN/UPC) | GS1 DataMatrix / Digital Link QR | RAIN RFID (Gen2v2) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line of sight required | Yes | Yes | No |
| Reads per second | One at a time | One at a time | Hundreds simultaneously |
| Carries batch, expiry, serial | No — GTIN only | Yes | Yes |
| Item-level unique identity | No | Yes (with serial AI) | Yes (SGTIN in EPC bank) |
| Readable by a consumer phone | Partially | Yes | NFC variants only |
| Resists cloning | No | No — copyable image | Yes, with AES crypto tags |
| Survives shrink-wrap and cartons | No | No | Yes |
| Cost per unit | Effectively zero | Effectively zero | Tag cost applies |
| Best suited to | Legacy POS scanning | Consumer engagement, DPP, compliance marking | Bulk movement, inventory, authentication |
SeekSoft SCT treats these as complementary: a RAIN tag for operational throughput, a GS1 Digital Link QR for the consumer and the regulator, and both resolving to the same serialised identity in one event repository.
Business Impact
What changes in the operating model — for supply chain heads, brand-protection leads, quality officers and CFOs.
Inventory record accuracy
Item-level RFID moves stock accuracy out of the 65–75% band typical of manual and barcode counting, which is what makes omnichannel promises deliverable rather than aspirational.
Recall isolation time
Serialised events replace a lot-wide withdrawal with a query. The affected units, their consignees and their delivery addresses are returned before the crisis call has finished.
Sales uplift reported
Retailers in the ECR Retail Loss Group study attributed growth in this range to better on-shelf availability and replenishment once accurate item-level data was in place.
Lower stock holding
Accurate visibility releases safety stock that existed only to cover uncertainty in the records, freeing working capital without reducing service levels.
Dispatch verification
A full pallet is verified against the ASN as the forklift drives through the portal — no line of sight, no unwrapping, no carton-by-carton scan under time pressure.
Brand-protection casework
Diversion moves from anecdote to a documented chain of custody with a named consignee, which is the difference between suspecting a leak and acting on it.
A candid note on benchmarks. The ranges above come from published multi-retailer research — principally the ECR Retail Loss Group study and Auburn University RFID Lab work — and are strongest in apparel and specialty retail. Results in pharma, industrial and food supply chains depend heavily on tag qualification, read-point coverage and partner data discipline. AOPL sizes every business case against your own baseline before committing to a number.
Why Traditional Operations Struggle
Five structural reasons large organisations lose control of traceability and brand integrity — and what each one costs.
Visibility stops at the first handover
Most ERP and WMS deployments are excellent inside the four walls and blind outside them. Once a pallet leaves the gate, the record becomes a document — an invoice, a despatch advice, a GRN — rather than an observation. Documents describe intent; they do not prove what physically happened. When a distributor claims short receipt or a batch surfaces in the wrong market, there is no independent evidence either way.
Batch-level granularity forces over-recall
If the smallest traceable unit is a lot, then the smallest recallable unit is also a lot. Organisations routinely withdraw tens of thousands of units to address a defect confined to a few hundred, because proving the difference is impossible. The destroyed stock, the logistics and the retailer penalties are all avoidable costs of insufficient granularity.
Counterfeit detection is reactive by design
Printed serials, holograms and tamper labels can all be replicated by a competent operation. Because verification depends on comparing a code to a list, the first signal usually arrives as a consumer complaint or a lab failure — after the product has been consumed. Counterfeit trade is a persistent, industrial-scale problem: OECD and EUIPO analysis put global trade in fakes at roughly USD 467 billion in 2021, about 2.3% of world trade, with clothing, footwear and leather goods together making up 62% of seized items.
Partner data does not interoperate
Every tier builds its own file format, field names and timestamp conventions. Integrating twenty partners becomes twenty bespoke projects, and each one decays as systems change. This is precisely the problem GS1 EPCIS and the Core Business Vocabulary were designed to remove — a shared event grammar so that "shipped" means the same thing in every system that reads it.
Manual capture cannot scale to compliance
Regulators have moved from records to real-time interoperable data: DSCSA package-level electronic exchange in the US, Schedule H2 QR codes in India, Digital Product Passports in the EU from 2027, and 2D barcodes at retail point of sale under Sunrise 2027. A process that depends on operators scanning cartons accurately under production pressure will not survive audit at that level of scrutiny.
Shrink is discovered, not prevented
When counts happen quarterly, losses accumulate for months before anyone notices, and by then the cause is unrecoverable. Frequent, low-effort counting changes the economics: discrepancies surface while the cause is still identifiable, which is why counting frequency — not counting effort — is the lever that actually reduces shrink.
Industries We Serve
Traceability requirements differ sharply by sector. SeekSoft SCT is configured to each, not retrofitted.
Pharmaceuticals & Biologics
Schedule H2 QR, iVEDA exports, DSCSA and FMD on one serialisation core, with cold-chain evidence for biologics.
Apparel, Footwear & Luxury
Item-level tagging for store accuracy, plus crypto-authenticated NFC for resale, returns and grey-market control.
Food, Beverage & Agri
Lot lineage through TransformationEvents, FSSAI recall readiness and farm-to-shelf provenance for export buyers.
Automotive & Aftermarket
Genuine-part authentication at the dealer counter, warranty fraud control and tier-2 component traceability.
Electronics & Components
On-metal tagging, counterfeit-component screening at goods-in and full build-of-materials genealogy.
Chemicals & Lubricants
Tamper-evident closures, refill-fraud detection and batch traceability through blending and decanting.
Defence & Aerospace
Part pedigree, counterfeit-part exclusion and air-gapped deployment for sites with no external connectivity.
Retail & E-Commerce
Ship-from-store accuracy, returns authentication and marketplace takedown evidence for listed counterfeits.
Start with one product family, not a transformation programme
AOPL runs a structured assessment — tag qualification against your actual packaging, a read-point map of your network, a regulatory gap analysis and a costed business case — before anything is installed. You get a decision-grade document either way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Direct answers to the questions quality managers, supply chain heads and compliance teams ask us first.