Many manufactures rely upon the use of reusable containers within their manufacturing processes or internal manufacturing supply chain.

Sometimes subassemblies are placed into reusable containers and shipped to other manufacturing facilities so they may be incorporated into other assemblies. Other times raw materials are shipped from suppliers in containers owned by the manufacturer or between manufacturing facilities within the same organization. Many times these containers have a finite life cycle or are required to be maintained after a certain number of uses.

• A bar coded label is affixed to a reusable container
• The outside of the label may/may not have a visible identifier such as human readable text. The label contains a unique bar code identifier
• As each container is filled with product to be shipped, its identifier can be tracked as part of the ASN information. Product information may also be encoded
• Each container is returned empty to the facility and recorded by scanning the bar code
• The life cycle of the container can be tracked through each return and can be discarded at the end of its targeted life-cycle or scheduled for require maintenance