Bruno Baron, Picdi

"Companies are just scratching the surface of the potential applications of RFID."

Bruno Baron, CEO, Picdi

How is your organisation involved with RFID technology?
Picdi manages end-to-end projects and provides turnkey solutions for companies who want to use RFID to improve their productivity or keep their costs down. We take the technology of RFID and make it part of the solutions we propose. RFID allows us to help our customers locate material, keep up with maintenance schedules, have an accurate status of their inventory, manage the arrivals and departure of orders in their warehouses, and more.

Can you share an example of a project?
Sure: Imagine a municipality that has a system of public light fixtures – streetlights, lighting for pedestrian crosswalks, that sort of thing. All of those fixtures have light bulbs and wiring that must be verified regularly. Thanks to RFID, a worker can use a handheld device that reads an RFID tag on the light fixture and records that he performed maintenance on it. Thanks to RFID, that handheld device automatically notes the date, time and precise place. The worker doesn’t have to fill in piles of paperwork, or manually type data into a computer: he can just focus on doing his primary job of maintaining the urban lighting system in good working order. In this sort of case, Picdi would help choose and install the RFID tags, enable synchronisation between the handhelds and the master network, and write and install the programmes that allow the data gathered to be studied and used.

What does the future hold for RFID?
Companies are just scratching the surface of the potential applications of RFID. At Picdi, our R&D team is entirely focused on finding more innovative ways to use this technology.

For example, we have created a solution that uses RFID to allow chemical, pharmaceutical and agro-alimentary firms to better manage expiration dates – it automatically detects when a package has been opened, and then counts down the days until its contents go bad.

We are also working on a solution that would enable RFID tags to not only read and stock information about the temperature of the item it is attached to – which is a vital bit of information for companies who have to guarantee that a cold chain has been preserved during delivery.


Specialised in RFID, Picdi helps companies to integrate personalised RFID solutions, from consulting services to the complete solution deployment. Picdi is also leading R&D projects in order to design innovative smart tags. See www.picdi.fr for more information.