Cosmetics company Sephora is rolling out a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon solution to provide content related to a shopper's proximity when that customer uses Sephora's app on an Apple iPhone. The beacon system is slated to be rolled out to all of the company's stores following a pilot of the solution that began in the fall at two San Francisco-area sites. The retailer has not indicated the timeline for the installation rollout. The beacons and content-management software are being provided by Gimbal.

German casual apparel company Marc O'Polo has adopted a radio frequency identification solution to track its products across the entire supply chain, from its distribution center to 86 of its stores throughout Europe. The company finished installing the system at all 87 sites by September 2014, and is now expanding the deployment to include the tagging of products by manufacturers, thereby enabling the retailer to track its merchandise from the point at which they are made.

The University of Southern California housing office knew its housing facilities, on and off campus, had upwards of 60,000 pieces of furniture and appliances. But until the student housing office deployed a radio frequency identification system, tracking which items were at what locations, as well as which were broken, missing or due for replacement, required exhaustive manual inventories. Those inventory counts, typically conducted during summers, required the hiring of temporary workers and many hours of labor to catalog what was where.

For the past four years, Julio Cesar Lestido S.A., the official Uruguayan importer of cars and trucks manufactured by the Volkswagen Group, has been employing passive ultrahigh-frequency RFID tags to track the metal tools it uses to maintain vehicles. The company says that it is now developing a plan to utilize the technology to record each vehicle's life history, including its date of import and sales information, as well as all maintenance provided.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) is deploying a radio frequency identification technology that enables its own laboratory testing of samples from job sites, as well as inspections of precast concrete materials at the sites of suppliers, to be captured and then managed electronically.

Deere-Hitachi Construction Machinery Corp. is employing AeroScout Industrial Wi-Fi radio frequency identification tags to track the assembly of construction machinery at its facility in Kernersville, N.C.

Equipment used at a West Australian open-pit iron mine is being managed across a 40-square-mile area via active radio frequency identification tags to identify where certain equipment is located, as well as control its operation.