Why Santa naturally works with RFID

He and his team have become more and more efficient over the centuries. It couldn’t be any other way. The generation of smartphone children has high expectations of their gift deliveries: error-free, fast, on time. Santa can’t afford to deliver the wrong presents, otherwise people will no longer believe in him next year. Providing millions of children with exactly the right gift at the right place in a very small time window requires the utmost logistical precision. We went to the North Pole for you and took a look.

If you work in a warehouse with several million items, then you will be familiar with this. Only fully automated inventory management can ensure that all downstream processes run smoothly: Incoming goods, picking, delivery – to name just a few to name but a few. Team X-Mas relies on RFID-based item identification to monitor all stocks in real time. The improved stock accuracy reduces the risk of over- or understocking. The latter would be a fiasco, especially from mid-December. This enables the Christmas elves to react to changes in demand at short notice. After all, there are always kids who submit their wish lists at the last minute.
We are amazed when we see that real-time stock tracking not only works for internal North Pole intralogistics, but also guarantees reliable track and trace along the entire supply chain or “flight route”, as they say here.

At the gift DC, you can tell that the optimization of the picking process was not just about error-free and efficient picking. It is also about resource-saving personnel deployment. You will certainly be familiar with this from your pre-Christmas business – especially if you work in e-commerce retail … the workload that order pickers and warehouse staff have to cope with during this time is enormous. Route-optimized, RFID-guided picking makes life easier for staff and speeds up the process so that all orders can still be processed within the specified time. Digital packing lists are created automatically and register the goods for loading. The withdrawal of goods is recorded immediately in order to maintain reliable stock levels at all times. Replenishment orders are triggered automatically when stock levels fall below a minimum level.

Even we have never seen so many pallets at once. It’s impossible to organize a manual and secure outgoing goods process here. But everything here is fully automated and digitalized anyway – it’s unparalleled in terms of efficiency. Huge RFID gates read thousands of items correctly at once as Santa’s trolley passes through and compare them with his current tour data. No room for errors! Parents can request a digital delivery bill as proof of delivery. After all, you don’t want any arguments under the Christmas tree.

For many companies, the Christmas business means an extreme strain on their own logistics. Complaints are particularly sensitive at this time and highly emotional in the end customer business. With RFID-guided processes, you can pick up even more speed in a “very fast time” and avoid errors at the same time.

We can tell you about it: Santa Claus has been using RF KonSys modules for several years. Perhaps also because we were able to supply RFID transponders that still work at minus 30 degrees. Well, and if he wasn’t so busy, we would have already made a success story with him. But a little magic should still remain…