Panalpina is a global supply chain and logistics provider, headquartered in Switzerland, serving customers worldwide. The company approached RES to bring RFID into its cross-dock operations — and to offer its own clients a faster, more accurate alternative to a process that ran on manual counts and barcode scans. The result was an end-to-end RFID cross-docking system spanning two continents.
The challenge
Panalpina’s cross-dock flow moved product from its Lugano, Switzerland facility to Secaucus, New Jersey. Boxes were assigned to House Bills and Master Bills, then manually counted, scanned, and verified before shipping — and counted and scanned all over again on receipt.
- Checking and re-checking physical shipment counts was slow and prone to human error.
- Every box had to be hand-scanned on the way out and again on the way in, demanding significant labor and leaving room for inventory inaccuracies.
How the RFID cross-docking system works
RES built the solution on its AIMS platform with RFID scanning portals at the dock doors of both facilities. As boxes arrive in Lugano, each is tagged and “commissioned” — its RFID tag and box ID read and linked so the tag carries the box’s full information. AIMS is linked to Panalpina’s database, so shipping data, order information, and scans flow between the two systems without changing Panalpina’s existing applications.
Once a shipment is assembled and assigned to its House and Master Bills, it passes under the RFID portal on exit. In about six seconds, every box is read with 100% accuracy and the order is verified against the Master Bill — flagging any missing, extra, or incorrect items before it leaves. That data travels in real time to Secaucus, where the same verification happens on arrival. Because each box is linked to both a House and Master Bill, both sites get running, box-level totals at any moment: what was received, when, and what’s still outstanding.
The results
- RFID portals replaced hand-scanning entire pallets — no more disassembling a pallet to find a misplaced barcode.
- Real-time AIMS updates gave Panalpina complete inventory visibility across the cross-docking process.
- Product is tracked with 100% accuracy, with systemic data always current.
- A dramatic increase in the speed and accuracy of cross-dock operations, with far less manual labor.
The takeaway
Cross-docking lives or dies on accuracy at speed. By reading an entire shipment in seconds and verifying it automatically at both ends, RES turned a labor-heavy, error-prone process into a real-time one. That’s the foundation of RES’s RFID asset tracking for inventory and logistics. To see what it could do for your operation, talk to an RES RFID engineer.
