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By Richard Woodburn | Oct. 15, 2026
How Can You Stop Losing Supply Chain Assets You Already Own?
Key Takeaways
- An RFID data-driven Returnable Transport Item (RTI) tracking strategy provides the real-time visibility needed to stop losing supply-chain assets, eliminate container shrinkage, optimize fleet utilization, and reduce operational bottlenecks.
- A direct consequence of poor asset visibility, the annual loss of 10-15% of RTIs like pallets, totes, and crates generates a billion-dollar replacement bill across U.S. retail, food distribution, and manufacturing sectors, placing significant stress on operations and capital.
- By adopting a strategy that treats RTIs as an intelligent, trackable infrastructure, businesses can use real-time data to turn a costly blind spot into a revenue-carrying fleet with clear utilization targets.
RTIs form the backbone of the modern supply chain, yet they remain one of its most significant and costly vulnerabilities. These essential assets, from pallets and totes to roll cages, often operate in a black box, disappearing from the network without a trace. This lack of oversight creates daily operational friction that scales into significant risk and financial loss during peak seasons.
A striking discipline gap exists. Businesses track finished goods down to the SKU, but the assets carrying them vanish. This nuisance leakage represents a massive and often accepted cost of doing business.
The Billion-Dollar Blind Spot
The industry norm involves losing 10-15% of the RTI pool every year. Conservatively, this generates a replacement bill in the U.S. that runs around $1 billion annually. This represents capital spent once, only to be spent again. One industry contact shared an infuriating story about sending RTIs to suppliers who never returned them, only to find his own company’s assets for sale on the spot market.
Loss, however, tells only half the story. The rest unfolds in the form of panic buying, emergency freight, and manual searches, all of which add stress and cost to an operation. The fix moves beyond hiring more people to count. It requires a change in mindset.
From Packaging Expense to Intelligent Infrastructure
A fundamental shift in perspective is needed. We encourage leaders to stop treating pallets, cages, and totes as a packaging expense and start managing them as a revenue-carrying fleet with utilization targets. This requires giving every RTI a unique digital identity and the ability to locate it in real time. The value of a strategic approach that integrates both hardware and software providers becomes immense at this stage.
This methodology follows a clear three-step path. The first step, visibility, establishes where every asset resides in real time, not from a spreadsheet or a monthly count, but through live, automated data. Next comes control. With asset visibility, decisive action becomes possible, allowing for the reallocation and rebalancing of the pool before shortages become a reality. Finally, the impact becomes clear. Operations achieve calmer peaks, faster turns, fewer replacement purchases, and less emergency freight.
Visibility That Pays
At an executive level, business leaders invest in performance, capital efficiency, and resilience. A mature RTI program delivers on all three by focusing on five key metrics: shrinkage rate, asset turn rate, dwell time, pool balance, and intervention frequency. A well-implemented solution continuously monitors these five metrics, turning visibility into measurable business value.
This concept holds up in the real world. Industry success stories show this principle in action. One fish distributor, Pack and Sea, successfully tracks 350,000 RFID-tagged crates from fishing fleets to processing plants and back. Another large-scale business, Container Centralen, manages a fleet of 5.5 million roll cages. Facing a daunting number, they distributed single clip-on RFID tags to their retail partners and successfully secured and verified their entire pool.
The availability of purpose-built hardware makes these deployments possible. Ultra-rugged fixed readers with integrated antennas and cellular capabilities can capture data from a dock door or the back of a delivery truck. Likewise, specialized labels with high-tack adhesives can last over five years and withstand repeated wash cycles. The challenge of tagging no longer presents the roadblock it once did. An idle asset represents capital already spent that produces nothing. Giving RTIs a digital voice empowers teams to keep every asset working, turning a frustrating cost center into a competitive advantage.
From Strategy to Action
The journey from a reactive cost center to a proactive, revenue-carrying fleet begins with a single strategic shift. The next step is to explore the specific strategies that make this shift a reality.
For a deeper dive, watch the full on-demand webinar, “Mastering RTI Tracking for a Smarter Supply Chain.”
For those attending Pack Expo, take the opportunity to see these solutions live. Zebra and Lyngsoe are hosting an exclusive RFID Open House on October 19 and 20 at the Zebra Futures Lab in Buffalo Grove, IL. [Register Here] to reserve a spot for a hands-on demonstration of automated RTI tracking.
Topics: RFID; Warehouse and Distribution; Transportation and Logistics; Food Distribution
