Reusable transport items (RTIs) are supposed to save costs and support sustainability, but too often, poor visibility turns them into a money pit. In a recent webinar, Wiliot’s Zach Lowman explained how battery-free Bluetooth tags can transform totes, pallets, and roll cages into active supply chain agents. Investing in technologies to reduce asset loss can also help optimize logistics and product freshness.
Companies invest heavily in reusable transport items (RTIs) such as pallets, totes, and roll cages. In theory, these assets cut replacement costs, reduce waste, and support sustainability targets. In practice, many operators struggle with high turnover, shrinkage, and a lack of visibility.
According to Zach Lowman, Senior Director at Wiliot, “what should be an active agent in your supply chain is, in many cases today, actually acting as a money pit.”
The Problem with RTIs Today
Many organizations cannot even confirm the total number of RTIs in their fleet. Poor visibility leads to missed shipments, delays, and cold chain risks. With asset turnover rates in some fleets as high as 40 percent, losses add up quickly—not only in replacement costs, but also in indirect costs such as line stoppages, out-of-stocks, and dissatisfied customers.
Lowman spent time on reverse logistics, calling it “the real challenge” for RTIs: bringing assets back to the point of fill in the right quantities while DC-to-DC or store-to-store transfers muddy the count. He cited mis-ship rates of “about two to five orders” out of every hundred due to misloads or drop-offs at the wrong site, with knock-on costs from claims and missed sales.
A core issue for many operators is sheer asset loss. Totes, cages, and pallets leak out of the system at alarming rates, whether left behind at customer sites, misplaced in transfer between DCs, or simply stolen when left unattended. Lowman noted that fleets can see turnover rates as high as 40 percent, representing not only millions of dollars in replacement costs but also disruption to operations. “If you can’t track the RTI itself, how can you expect to track the product sitting on it?” he asked.
Key Takeaways for RTI Managers
- Asset visibility is still the biggest gap. Fleets lose up to 40% of totes, roll cages, and pallets annually due to poor tracking.
- Conventional tracking tools have limits. RFID requires costly infrastructure; active beacons add expense and battery upkeep.
- Battery-free Bluetooth tags provide a middle path. Wiliot’s IoT Pixels use harvested RF energy, broadcasting frequently without batteries.
- ROI can be fast. Inventory intelligence often pays back in six months, with workflow optimization and condition monitoring layered onto the same system.
- Cold chain gets a lift. Per-asset temperature histories prevent waste and support FEFO (first-expired, first-out) inventory management.
Limitations of Current Tracking Technologies
Traditional RFID tags offer low unit costs but require expensive infrastructure—handheld scanners or dock-door portals—making scale deployments cost-prohibitive. Active Bluetooth beacons avoid those infrastructure costs but bring their own challenges: ongoing battery maintenance and high per-unit costs.
“The actual cost of the beacon itself… very quickly now becomes a majority of the value of the asset that you’re trying to track,” Lowman said.
Wiliot positions itself between these two technologies. Its paper-thin IoT Pixels are battery-free Bluetooth tags that harvest energy from surrounding radio signals. The tags broadcast data to existing Bluetooth-enabled infrastructure such as hubs, Wi-Fi access points, or truck telemetry units and stream it to the Wiliot cloud for analysis.
Instead of snapshot data from scans, companies get a continuous real-time feed of location, inventory, and even condition. “We’re helping to stop the loss before it actually happens, thanks to real-time, scan-free data,” said Lowman.
On deployment, he advised placing Bluetooth readers at “areas of change” such as at staging, filling, dock doors, truck interiors, rather than blanketing entire warehouses. The battery-free tags harvest RF energy and can broadcast “as often as once every 30 seconds,” though cadence depends on the RF environment. Existing Wi-Fi access points and operational handhelds can act as listeners.
Three Layers of Value
Lowman described a step-by-step model of value creation for RTI users:
Inventory Intelligence: Identify the real-time location and quantity of RTIs across the network, cutting asset losses and reducing stockouts. Typical ROI: ~6 months.
Workflow Optimization: Associate order data with RTIs, eliminating manual scans and enabling instant alerts for misloads or mis-shipments.
Condition Monitoring: Add real-time temperature data to create “a temperature passport” for cold chain assets, supporting quality, compliance, and even a shift from FIFO to FEFO (first expired, first out).
“Freshness is the largest differentiator in grocery,” Lowman noted. “By catching temperature excursions at the asset level, we can both reduce waste and improve customer satisfaction.”
For cold chain users, the tags create a temperature history for each pallet or tote, rather than relying on a single reefer logger for the entire load. That means the system can detect problems such as assets left too long on a loading dock, or pallets positioned near cooling vents that may freeze and thaw repeatedly. Because data is collected at the asset level, companies can distinguish between items that truly experienced a temperature excursion and those that stayed within range. In practice, this avoids costly over-reactions, for example, rejecting an entire truckload when the reefer logger shows an out-of-range reading, even though many pallets inside remained compliant.
A Platform Approach
Because the same tag and network infrastructure support all three solutions, companies can start by solving the asset loss problem and then scale up to optimize workflows and cold chain management.
“If we start by wanting to stop losing our assets, we can very easily stop losing our orders, as well as stop losing quality—all using the same deployment and the same technology,” Lowman said.
Source: Wiliot
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Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.
