RFID tracking software for UK retail, distribution centres and 3PL warehouses

Several large UK fashion and general-merchandise retailers now tag at item level, and many suppliers ship goods already tagged. In a store, the value sits at three kinds of door. The stockroom door tells you what has gone out to the floor and what is still in the back. The fitting rooms show what was taken in and what came out. The exits show what left. Spatial Map draws each reader at its door with its last read and read count, places tagged items at the reader that last saw them, and colours a reader that has gone quiet so a dead portal is spotted on the morning walk rather than at the next stock count.

For tags, readers and middleware in general, see our RFID tracking software page. Spatial Map does not sound alarms at the exit — your EAS or RFID gates keep that job; it gives store and loss-prevention teams a map of what happened and a read trail for the incident file.

British store replenishment runs on returnable transit items: roll cages, dollies, plastic totes and pallets that leave the DC full and are supposed to come back. They drift — into store yards, supplier sites and other depots — and replacing them is a steady cost. Tagging the equipment and reading it at DC dock doors and at each store’s goods-in turns that drift into data.

Spatial Map shows those reads where they happen: cages by dock door and marshalling lane at the DC, and at the goods-in door of each store you map. If your system works out a balance per store — sent out, returned, outstanding — that number can sit on the store in a report or colour it with a style rule. Reads come in the same way as any other data: your middleware or a small relay posts batches to a table with the table write API, or Spatial Map polls a REST endpoint you already have.

The Midlands “golden triangle” is home to a dense cluster of large distribution sheds, many of them run by 3PLs for several clients under one roof. Client zones move as contracts start, grow and end, so the map has to change easily: in Spatial Map a client’s zone is an area you redraw in minutes, and its racks keep their bin locations. Stock and RFID pallets can be coloured by client from a field in your WMS data.

Each client can get its own monthly pack — built-in reports or your own, exported to PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON — and a read-only share link limited to its own floors and layers, with an expiry date and a view cap. Solutions group the facilities, reports and data of one client across several sheds inside the same workspace.

Felixstowe is the UK’s busiest container port and Southampton a major deep-sea port on the south coast, and both are ringed by port-centric warehouses that de-van containers and do distribution work next to the quay instead of trucking everything inland first. Tagging pallets as a container is stripped, then reading them at the dock door into storage and again on the way out, gives a clean record of what each box contained and where it went.

The Eastport demo shows the pattern on one site: 50 dock doors, 44 yard slots, a gate and weighbridge and 1,180 RFID pallets moving through the cross-dock. Spatial Map does not connect to port community systems or make customs declarations; it shows what your reads and WMS say is physically in the building.

Consumer electronics, fragrance, spirits and other high-value lines usually sit in a locked cage or a separate secure store inside the warehouse. Reading items or trays at the cage gate, alongside access-control events from the same door, shows when stock moved and who was in the zone. In the Northgate demo, 863 tagged units are followed reader by reader through the cage and vault, and the History player replays a unit’s path for an investigation. Spatial Map does not lock or open doors — your access control does.

RFID on cages, totes, pallets and products does not identify anyone. It becomes personal data under UK GDPR when reads are tied to a person — a staff badge at the cage gate, a name against a tool. If you plan to do that, the ICO’s guidance on monitoring workers is the context to read first: be clear about the purpose, tell staff, collect only what you need and consider a data protection impact assessment. Your legal advisers decide what applies to you. Our DPA and security page describe how Spatial Map handles your data.