It is increasingly good business for brand owners and retailers to use the cloud to ensure that their products are available to their consumers. RFID and NFC specialists have developed their own platforms that allow brand owners and retailers to track their products from beginning to end.

A year ago, Avery Dennison launched atma.io to connect the physical and digital worlds. A year later, atma.io has been successfully integrated into numerous items, and there is much more to come.

“Currently, atma.io manages over 22 billion items on our platform across the apparel, retail, food, and healthcare segments,” said Michael Goller, technical director, atma.io, Avery Dennison Smartrac. “Six of the top 20 apparel brands globally by revenue and four of the top 10 quick-service restaurants (QSRs) are using the atma.io platform.”

Goller noted that atma.io connected product cloud is a platform that connects physical and digital worlds by assigning unique digital IDs to everyday items, providing end-to-end transparency by tracking, storing and managing all the events associated with each individual product — all the way from source to consumer and beyond, enabling circularity.

“Our platform offers customers an ecosystem of front-end applications (third party software solutions) integrated with the connected product cloud (an ‘app’ store for digital IDs),” added Goller.
 
“The atma.io platform, with an Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) repository at its core, provides effortless ways of processing item-level event streams that customers can simply rely on,” Goller added. “With our platform, we take away the many hurdles of running an interconnected system operating on this level of granularity at scale and make it a reliable building block in our customers’ ever-growing and increasingly complex system landscape.” 

Goller said that the atma.io platform offers numerous benefits to users.

“Designed to be open, easily integrated and systems-agnostic, atma.io solves the market pain of supply chains using different digital triggers, such as 2D barcodes (QR codes), UHF RFID or NFC, for different purposes and enabling all item-level data to be connected in one end-to-end platform,” said Goller.

“atma.io provides a single source of truth for brands, supply chains and consumers for truly connected products,” he added. “The atma.io app store approach enables brands to tap into an ecosystem of applications to unlock every connected product use case imaginable; customers and partners have the ability to build on top of atma.io’s end-to-end platform and tap a new channel for growth.”

Goller pointed out that atma.io has added functionality in its latest release.

“With our latest release, we have launched several new features to drive savings and sustainability through traceability,” Goller added. “For example, we are accounting for the production- and distribution-related carbon impact, which also includes metrics for recycled content. Our calculation models have the ability to incorporate additional impact aspects and with the growing adoption amongst our customer base, we are getting more and more insights into the end-of-life aspect.”

In addition to RFID, NFC pand 2D barcodes, the atma.io platform works well with other Avery Dennison offerings, including Willot sensors.

“Following the design principles of an open platform that is trigger-agnostic, atma.io is designed to be open and compatible with all of Avery Dennison’s partners,” Goller noted. “Among the different partners in the Avery Dennison ecosystem, Wiliot enables customers to identify items, and also measure specific conditions such as temperature – making it a perfect input that enriches the item-level event streams into the atma.io platform.”

Goller pointed out that one key to the atma.io platform is eliminating waste and increasing sustainability.

“‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure’ goes the old but famous quote. With the current release, we have laid the foundation to accurately measure and analyze different aspects of the value chain and provide in-depth analytics,” he said.

“Our current efforts are building on this foundation to provide our customers with tangible ways of actually managing and changing what is happening in the supply chain: From simple daily operational improvements to reduce waste all the way to more profound and strategic measures in terms of supplier assessment, our platform helps customers to achieve savings and sustainability through traceability,” he added.

In the most recent version, atma.io added a Real-time Waste Elimination Tool that utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze and alert on concerns across the supply chain, such as overdue movement of products at a pallet level or even individual items in a warehouse that are close to perishing.

Goller added that atma.io empowers organizations with fine-granular transparency about when, where, and how products are being made and what paths they take until they reach the consumer.

“Today’s consumers expect this totally new level of transparency before they make a purchase decision and companies need to be able to demonstrate that they adhere to the highest standards. By giving each product a digital birth certificate, we enable our customers to build a trusted relationship with their consumers based on the foundation of sustainable and circular operations,” Goller concluded.