Loss Prevention Using Monza R6-P

When using a RAIN RFID tag for Loss Prevention or Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) we are required to solve several core challenges:

• Quickly discriminate sold from not-sold items: An exit gate should be able to decide, within a few milliseconds, whether any particular tagged item is sold or not-sold.
• Not alarm on foreign tags: The solution should ignore tags from other retailers and from other applications, yet reliably alarm on not-sold store tags.
• Allow seamless product returns: The solution should allow a consumer to seamlessly return an item, and a retailer to quickly verify the sold status of the item before accepting the return.
• Protect consumer privacy: The solution should (1) minimize false alarms and (2) allow seamless product returns without storing consumer information on the tag.
• Provide Gen2 compatibility: The solution should not interfere with other uses of the tag, such as for inventory visibility.

The three solutions described in this note have been designed to address different retail environments. All three solutions can be deployed using Monza R6-P (MR6-P) with the Max_User memory profile and they take into account the differing capabilities of point-of-sale and point-of-exit equipment.

The Loss Prevention solutions in this note are simple and meet the goals often specified in retailer requirements:

• They quickly discriminate sold from not-sold items
• They allow seamless product returns
• They do not alarm on foreign tags
• They protect consumer privacy
• They are Gen2 compatible

While the Loss Prevention solutions in this application note can be used with most of Impinj’s Monza chip family, they are ideally suited to implementation using Impinj’s retail-optimized Monza R6-P.