GLOSSARY
RFID Linen and Workwear Tracking Glossary
A plain-language reference to the terms used in RFID linen, workwear and commercial laundry management. Definitions reflect how these terms are used in day-to-day operations by hospitals, hotels, manufacturers and commercial laundries in South Africa.
Tags and hardware
UHF RFID tag — An Ultra High Frequency radio tag sewn into or heat-sealed onto a garment or linen item. It carries a unique identifier that can be read at distance without line of sight, which is what allows a full trolley of linen to be counted in one pass rather than item by item.
Passive tag — A tag with no internal battery. It draws the power it needs from the reader’s radio field, which is why laundry tags can survive years of industrial washing with no maintenance and no charging.
Heat-seal tag — A tag bonded to a garment with heat and pressure rather than stitched. Common on workwear where a sewn pocket would be uncomfortable or would fail under industrial pressing.
Read point — Any location where tags are scanned: a tagging station, a dirty receive bay, a wash tunnel entry, a packing bench, a doorway. The set of read points determines what the system can see.
Tunnel reader — A reader positioned at a wash tunnel so every item entering the wash is recorded. Used to verify that items received were actually processed rather than set aside.
Exit monitor — A reader mounted at a doorway or gate that records every tagged item passing through it. The basis of leakage detection: an item whose last scan was an exit point has left the building.
Handheld reader — A portable reader used for stock-takes, locating items in a room or store, and ad-hoc counts away from fixed read points.
Station — One functional read position in a deployment: tagging, dirty receive, heat seal, item movement, rewash, mending, packaging, exit monitor or handheld. Deployments are usually specified and quoted station by station.
The linen cycle
Leg — One directional movement in the linen cycle. A full hospital loop has four legs: clean linen out of the laundry, clean into the hospital, dirty out of the hospital, and dirty back into the laundry.
Four-leg audit — Reconciliation across all four legs of the cycle, so a shortfall can be attributed to a specific leg, collection and day rather than argued over as an aggregate total.
Dispatch — The scan recording that items have left a site, usually against a delivery note.
Receive — The scan recording that items have arrived at a site. A dispatch without a matching receive is the fundamental unit of a linen dispute.
Delivery note — The document a consignment travels under. RFID matching classifies each scanned item against the note it was expected on.
On-note — An item received that was listed on the delivery note it arrived with. The normal case.
Off-note — An item received that was not on the note it arrived with. Individually this may be a stray item; clustered around one note number it usually indicates an operator selected the wrong note at the receiving scan.
No-dispatch-found — An item received with no corresponding dispatch record anywhere. Either it was never scanned out, or it entered the cycle outside the tracked process.
Conversion rate — The proportion of dispatched items that were matched to a receive. Measured per delivery note, it is the single clearest indicator of whether a leg is working.
Zero-scan day — A day on which one party recorded no scans at all while the other recorded items. Usually a process or equipment failure rather than a loss event, and worth separating from genuine shortfalls.
Stock and loss
Par level — The quantity of linen a site is supposed to hold in circulation to operate normally. Loss is usually first noticed as an inability to hold par.
Shrinkage — The ongoing net loss of items from circulation through theft, misplacement, disposal without record, and items retained by staff or guests.
Leakage — Loss specifically through exit points, evidenced by items whose last recorded scan was at a monitored door.
Days since last scan — How long an item has been silent. Items are grouped into bands — a week, a fortnight, a month, never seen — with the longest-silent bands forming the follow-up list.
Never-seen — An item that was tagged and entered into the system but has never been scanned at any read point since. Usually indicates an item that never entered circulation, or a tag that failed at commissioning.
Stalled item — An item with no recent activity that has not yet reached end of life. Distinguished from a lost item because it may simply be sitting in off-cycle storage.
Custody chain — The unbroken record of which party held an item at each point. What makes a loss attributable rather than merely visible.
Per-wearer holding — In workwear, the live record of which garments each employee currently holds and for how long.
Chase list — An export of overdue garments with employee, item, issue time and hours outstanding, used to recover workwear without a manual audit.
Lifecycle and replacement
Lifetime wash count — The cumulative number of wash cycles a single item has been through, accumulated on the tag across its whole life.
Rated wash life — The number of washes an item type is expected to survive before it should be withdrawn. Configured per deployment rather than fixed, because fabric, chemistry and process vary.
Condemn threshold — The wash count at which an item is flagged for withdrawal from circulation.
Condemnation — Formally removing an item from circulation at end of life, recorded with a reason so that disposal is distinguished from loss.
End-of-life forecast — A projection, based on recent wash rates, of when each item type will reach its threshold and how many replacements to order.
Replacement band — A grouping of items by remaining life: early, mid, due soon, over life. Used to plan procurement from data rather than from an empty linen store.
System and reporting
Process profile — A per-customer configuration describing that site’s actual process model, including how many legs it has and how data flows. Allows one system to serve operations that work differently without changing the software.
Scoping — Restricting each login to the data belonging to its laundry, company, customer and site. Enforced on the server for every query, so a multi-property group can share one portal while each property sees only its own linen.
Item audit — A reconstruction of one item’s complete chronological history across every event type, pairing each dispatch with its subsequent receive to show complete or broken cycles. The tool used to settle a dispute about a specific item.
Read matrix — A day-by-station grid showing where reads occurred, used to expose gaps in reader coverage as distinct from missing stock.
Variance analysis — Comparison of expected against actual counts over a period, reported by item type and leg to show where a discrepancy is concentrated.
Rolling history window — A period during which late or batched scans can still be applied to earlier days, so consolidated industrial data reconciles correctly rather than appearing as a shortfall followed by a surplus.
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