Case Study — Events & Live Experiences
RFID attendee tracking for live events
How WH Factory automated guest accreditation and tracked room-to-room movement in real time — with Printer Manager for badge encoding and Gate Manager for directional gates, dropped into their existing systems without changing them
Knowing who's in the room. In real time.
WH Factory runs events where two things matter: accrediting guests as they arrive and knowing which room each of them is in during the day. Both relied on manual processes that were resource-intensive and left room for inaccuracy. The goal was to move to RFID: a system that tracks guest movements across every room automatically, with no action required from the attendees themselves. Every guest receives a printed, RFID-encoded badge at accreditation. Every room entrance has a gate that detects the direction of passage — in or out — and reports it to the event management system in real time. The solution came together across four teams, each on its own ground: SPQF led consulting and project management, ACD supplied the software that integrates with the hardware, an ACD hardware partner built the physical units to ACD and SPQF specifications, and everything plugged into WH Factory's management system, developed by a third-party system integrator.
Encoding badges on the printers WH Factory already had
The client already used accreditation totems fitted with printers to produce guest badges — either self-service or at a staffed desk. Rather than replace that setup, the team built purpose-made hardware plug-ins for the existing printers, adding the one missing piece — RFID encoding — directly at the point of print. Printer Manager handles that encoding: it drives the print job and writes the tag data in a single operation, returning the result to the backend. If a tag fails to encode, the badge is voided and reissued automatically — no manual intervention.
Floor-level gates with directional detection
The room gates use flat floor-mounted antennas — low visual impact, easy to install and move between venues. At each gate, Gate Manager reads the badges in transit, applies its directional algorithm, and turns the raw reads into clean in/out events, which it publishes to the event backend. The client's system consumes the stream and updates session attendance in real time.
"We needed to know who was in each room without asking anyone to do anything — and without rebuilding our systems. The RFID gates gave us exactly that."
Samuele Lanfredini
CEO
Automatic attendance. No manual steps.
The solution covers the full lifecycle: badge printed and encoded on arrival, guest tracked through every room transition, attendance data available live in the event backend. The key point is what didn't have to change. Both Printer Manager and Gate Manager integrated seamlessly with the management system developed by a third-party system integrator — neither WH Factory nor the integrator had to rewrite a single piece of application logic. The ACD software adapted to the system already in place, rather than forcing that system to adapt to it. That integration step is usually where a project like this burns the most time and risk, and it's exactly the step ACD's tools are built to absorb.
SPQF collaboration
Led the technology selection — hardware, software, and infrastructure — defined the new operational processes and business blueprint, and managed the project end to end.
ACD provided the integration software
Badge encoding at print through Printer Manager. Directional passage detection through Gate Manager. Seamless integration with WH Factory's existing management system, with no changes to its logic. Technical support throughout the deployment.
ACD hardware partner
Built the printer encoding plug-ins and the floor-gate units to specifications defined with ACD and SPQF.
System integrator
Developer of WH Factory's event management system — the platform the RFID layer integrated into, untouched.
This is the typical ACD collaboration pattern: the customer builds the software they know how to build, and ACD provides the tools to manage the hardware and the expertise on the RFID details that take years to master. Neither team had to step outside its competence. Neither team had to start from scratch.
Real-time
Session attendance updated live as participants move between rooms — no manual counts
Auto-void
Badges with failed RFID encoding detected and reissued automatically at the printer
Multi-room
A single Gate Manager setup coordinating multiple gates across the venue simultaneously