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The Alvear Palace, a luxury hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, now uses RFID technology to track and manage employees’ work uniforms.
Alvear Palace is a luxury hotel in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina
The system, dubbed “SuRF” and developed by Argentine system integrator Pino Consultores, uses 13.56 MHz passive tags and readers compliant with the ISO 15693 air interface protocol. The new system replaces the old manual system, which company director Sergio Del Pino says often leads to misplacement of uniforms, sometimes resulting in not enough clean uniforms for employees on duty.
This occasional shortage of clean uniforms is a big problem for hotels, because many uniforms are imported from Europe, making it impossible to get new uniforms quickly. Also, sometimes employees have to wear ill-fitting uniforms while waiting for new uniforms, which greatly affects the image of the hotel.
Del Pino has partnered with the hotel to put a small Sokymat I-Code label on each coat, shirt, trousers and other accessories. When an employee goes to work, he first reports to the uniform management department and receives a full set of uniforms that fit his size. The I-Code tag on each piece of clothing in the uniform is read by a desktop RFID reader, which sends the tag’s ID number to a database, which associates each tag’s ID number with the ID number of the received employee.
After get off work, employees return the entire uniform to the hotel uniform management department. There, the individual pieces of the uniform are sorted, another RFID reader reads the garment tags, and the system then sends them to the hotel’s laundry and dry cleaning rooms, where the software marks each garment as having been sent back to the warehouse.
Before adopting the RFID system, the hotel simply sewed a name tag on each garment and manually checked whether each garment was returned to the warehouse. But this manual inspection process is error-prone, and the uniform department has no way to notify employees immediately when their uniforms are not returned at the end of the shift. The new system enables automatic sending of information to employees.
Now, hotels can also use software to track the number of times each uniform has been washed or dry cleaned, and if it exceeds a predetermined number, the person in charge can be notified to replace the uniform. Hotel managers say the RFID system improves uniform management efficiency and simplifies the management process.
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