Reducing Container Loss with RFID-Based Asset Tracking

A guide for operations leaders evaluating RFID container tracking for returnable asset management.

Overview

For operations leaders, returnable containers (totes, bins, pallets, trays, crates, and other reusable transport items) are essential to keeping materials and finished goods moving through the supply chain. When containers go untracked, they get lost, stolen, delayed, or replaced unnecessarily, and that cost rarely shows up as one obvious line item. Industry research estimates that the direct cost of returnable transport item loss and theft is 10 to 30 percent of a company’s registered fleet in a given year.

One ACSIS customer, a leading US baking company, faced exactly this problem with roughly 8 million reusable trays in circulation across 11,000 distribution routes. Before tracking, unmonitored loss, theft, and damage were costing the company more than $9 million a year. After tagging every tray with RFID and barcodes, the company cut that loss by 33 percent, with savings projected at more than $45 million over five years. ACSIS, part of Antares Vision Group, helps operations teams solve this with RFID container tracking and returnable asset management built for complex distribution networks. This guide covers what to actually evaluate before choosing a platform.

The Visibility Gap That Drives the Loss

Returnable containers rarely sit still. They leave a plant with finished goods, sit at a customer dock, move back through a supplier, or get parked in a yard or warehouse waiting to be reused. With manual tracking or worse yet, no tracking at all, that movement leaves operations teams without answers to basic questions like: where a container is right now, how long it’s been out of circulation, and how many replacements need to be purchased. Spreadsheets weren’t built for that pace. Data gets entered late, and different facilities track the same container types in incompatible formats. By the time a shortage is visible, it’s been accumulating for weeks.

RFID closes that gap by automatically capturing movement, rather than relying on someone to remember to log it. GS1 notes that RAIN RFID tags can be read at distances well beyond 10 meters without line of sight, so a forklift carrying tagged containers through a dock door is captured with no scanning required. That’s the mechanism behind the loss reduction below.

What This Looked Like for a Leading US Baking Company

A leading multi-national baking company was struggling to track and hold onto the reusable trays used to move its baked products across an 11,000-route distribution network. With more than 8 million of these assets in circulation at any given time, all untagged, the company had no way to tell where trays were going missing or why.

At an estimated cost of around $12 per tray, the company was losing more than $9 million annually to shrinkage. Beyond the direct replacement cost, that shrinkage undercut the sustainability case for reusable packaging in the first place and made it impossible to trace losses back to a specific route, partner, or facility.

The company deployed ACSIS’s Returnable Asset Management solution, tagging trays with a combination of RFID and barcodes built to survive repeated industrial washing and handling. The system gave the company real-time tracking across the entire supply chain, with visibility into location and status that let them trace shrinkage back to specific routes and partners, rather than just noticing inventory was short.

The results: a 33 percent reduction in tray losses, several million dollars in savings in the first year, and a projected total of more than $45 million saved over five years. That’s measured against the company’s own $9 million annual loss baseline, not an abstract industry average. As ACSIS CEO Jeremy Coote put it: “A circular supply chain is something that every company aspires to, but the risk of costs and disruption often holds firms back. Yet time and again, our customers are smashing their supply chain goals with simple, easy-to-implement solutions like Returnable Asset Management.”

This isn’t isolated to one industry. A separate ACSIS customer, a distributor of fresh, chilled, and frozen goods supplying more than 50,000 US locations (primarily convenience stores), was losing over 30 percent of its reusable totes annually, at an estimated cost of more than $3.5 million a year, before deploying the same kind of RFID-based tracking. The products and fleets differ. The loss pattern doesn’t.

How ACSIS Supports RFID Container Tracking

Tagging a container is the easy part. What made the results above repeatable is what ACSIS does with the data afterward, rather than treating tagging as a standalone project:

Dual identity and durability. Tags combine RFID and barcodes on a single asset, so a tag failure in the field (a torn label, a damaged chip) doesn’t mean losing visibility entirely. The other identifier still works.
ERP and business-system integration. Movement data feeds directly into the systems operations teams already use for planning and purchasing, rather than living in a separate tracking dashboard nobody checks.
Contextual data, not just location. The system captures dwell time, route, partner, and product type alongside each scan. That’s the difference between knowing a container is “somewhere” and knowing where it is, what was in it, and who last touched it.
Accountability across partners. Movement data ties each loss back to a specific route, driver, or partner so that investigations can begin with actionable data.

It’s the same approach that cut losses by 33 percent and produced a projected $45 million in five-year savings for the baking company above, and it works the same way regardless of industry or container type.

What to Actually Look At Before Choosing a Platform

The points above are what to check for in any vendor, not just ACSIS. Beyond that, get specific about a few things before talking to anyone:

Which assets are actually driving the loss: container type, fleet size, which sites, routes, or partners most need visibility, and where RFID read points would need to go to capture it.
The vendor’s own before-and-after numbers: what a comparable fleet was losing annually before tracking, and what specifically drove the improvement, rather than a single savings figure without the baseline behind it.

A useful gut check before committing budget: ACSIS’s own ROI calculator breaks potential savings into the same categories worth interrogating in any vendor’s pitch: replacement cost from monthly container loss, labor time spent on manual cycle counts, working capital tied up in non-moving containers, and labor time spent searching for missing assets. Running your own fleet’s numbers through a breakdown like that is a faster way to sanity-check a vendor’s claims than taking a single composite savings figure at face value.

Ready to Reduce Container Loss with RFID-Based Tracking?

Before a conversation with a vendor, get a fleet-specific number: run your own containers, loss rate, and labor costs through the ACSIS ROI calculator to see what closing your visibility gap could actually be worth.

If the estimate suggests real exposure (unmonitored shrinkage, no way to trace losses back to a route or partner, a reusable packaging program quietly bleeding money), contact us today to walk through what a tailored deployment would look like for your specific fleet.