Cardinal Health, one of the largest healthcare services providers in the U.S., came to RES with a problem at the heart of its Specialized Pharmaceutical Delivery (SPD) consignment program. Blood-derivative products were shipped to customer sites and stored there until use — and almost everything about tracking them depended on people remembering to do it by hand. RES set out to replace that with real-time RFID consignment inventory visibility.

The challenge

  • SPD’s manual processes — data entry, cycle counts, inventory tracking — were labor-intensive for both Cardinal and its customers, and prone to human error. Accuracy and efficiency were constant concerns.
  • Once product left for a customer site, its storage and handling couldn’t be monitored, so there was no way to know whether temperature-sensitive products had been compromised.
  • Cardinal often didn’t know an item needed replenishing until the customer reached out — and customers sometimes ran out before recording usage at all, a serious risk in a hospital setting.

How the RFID consignment inventory system works

Building on its AIMS platform, RES delivered a refrigerated, RFID-enabled tracking system: a medical refrigerator fitted with a computer kiosk, a barcode scanner, and RFID readers. Each product is assigned a unique ID and tagged, and that data is shared between Cardinal’s system and the RES platform in real time.

When product arrives at a customer site, it’s checked automatically against the shipping order and any discrepancies are flagged. In RFID mode, staff simply place items inside the unit — no manual scan required. While inside, the unit monitors temperature and expiration and sends alerts when something needs attention. When an item is removed, it’s detected automatically, marked “out” with a date and time stamp, and an invoice is generated unless the item is transferred or returned. The system can even capture who took an item, which patient received it, and how long it has been out of refrigeration — flagging product that may be compromised based on its specific handling rules.

The results

  • Cardinal can track consignment products with 100% accuracy and capture detailed data on dispensation.
  • Many manual processes are automated, improving both accuracy and speed; real-time data sharing compounds the efficiency gain.
  • Storage, handling, and expiration can finally be monitored at customer sites — alleviating safety concerns and supporting compliance.
  • Real-time removal data drives faster replenishment, resolving long-standing problems with billing, out-of-stocks, and over-distribution.
  • The system was rolled out across more than 15 Cardinal customer locations.

The takeaway

For consignment inventory — where the product is high-value, temperature-sensitive, and sitting on someone else’s shelf — visibility is everything. RES turned a manual, blind process into a tracked, monitored, and billable one. That’s the foundation of RES’s RFID healthcare inventory management, and the same item-level approach extends to RFID asset tracking wherever owned stock has to be accounted for off-site. To see what it could do for your operation, talk to an RES RFID engineer.