RAIN Alliance has announced the publication of its RAIN Manufacturing Quality Guideline. This document addresses the pressing need for an open, transparent, and scalable framework for RAIN tag quality assurance and validation, providing an essential building block for manufacturers to certify their tags in an efficient, affordable, and trusted way.
“Over 50 billion RAIN tag chips were shipped in 2024, and it is projected that over 100 billion will be shipped in 2028 across critical industry sectors including retail, healthcare, logistics, automotive, and the military. The volume of use cases for RAIN technology has also seen exciting growth in recent years, and to maintain end user confidence in the technology, it’s crucial that quality standards remain reliably high,” comments Aileen Ryan, President and CEO of RAIN Alliance. “By providing a quality assurance and certification framework which can be relied on by end users around the world to ensure they have access to an ever-increasing volume of tags to meet their growing demand, the RAIN Alliance is delivering on our mission to accelerate the adoption of RAIN across more verticals and use cases than ever before. It has also given us the opportunity to create a scalable foundation for future open, transparent and globally available standardised certification.”
To meet the diverse needs of a growing number of use cases, the Guideline outlines the processes that are required to ensure tag quality; the recommended test methods to achieve proven, repeatable quality levels; and examines key quality metrics including Consistency, Yield Rate, Reliability, Appearance, and RF Performance. Responding to market feedback, the Guideline also lays the early foundations for both self-certification and third-party certification pathways for RAIN tag manufacturers.
Bahar Aliakbarian, Co-Chair of the RAIN Alliance Quality Manufacturing Workgroup adds: “The RAIN Alliance Manufacturing Quality Workgroup was established just last year with the aim to develop best practices and processes to certify the quality of RAIN tags quickly and efficiently, without compromising on performance and safety. Our work and the publication of this Guideline has provided tag manufacturers with a global, openly available, transparent framework for quality validation and certification that is scalable to the growth we are seeing in the usage and adoption of RAIN technology across countless sectors, which we expect to continue in the years to come.”
The RAIN Alliance Manufacturing Quality Workgroup will continue to evolve this initial Guideline, providing a common language which can be used to report quality metrics, and measurable and quantitative criteria to ensure appropriate quality standards for RAIN inlays across specific use cases can be proven.
This work will help to ensure ongoing end-user confidence in technology and provide RAIN tag manufacturers with a framework to prove their manufacturing quality in a consistent and transparent manner.
The full RAIN Manufacturing Quality Guideline is available for RAIN Alliance members to download via the resources page.