HospitalityRoom keys, staff credentials and the pieces around them.
Retail and loyaltyGift, loyalty and membership cards with variable data.
Access controlCards and fobs matched to the reader you installed.
Clubs and associationsOne chip for the turnstile, the locker and the desk.
Events and festivalsWristbands, badges and lanyards for each edition.A useful tender tells suppliers how a proposed credential will be evaluated. A list of chip names alone leaves important acceptance questions unanswered.
A credential tender is a test specification before it is a shopping list. The document that brings back comparable bids says how a proposed card will be judged, who judges it, and what evidence settles a disagreement. A list of chip names does none of those three things.
Every tender in this category eventually meets the same sentence in a bid: compatible with your existing system. That sentence is not a lie and it is not a commitment. It is a gap, and the tender either closed it in advance or did not. Four clauses close it. The brief that goes to a chosen supplier is a different document, covered in specifying a card order, and scoring the bids that come back is covered in comparing card quotations on the same specification.
A chip reference names a product. The outcome is a transaction: a named reader, at a working distance, through a given mounting. Two cards can both carry MIFARE DESFire EV3 and behave differently at the same door, because antenna geometry, inlay position, key diversification and reader firmware all sit between the chip and the door opening.
ISO/IEC 14443 is the usual source of the confusion. It defines the radio frequency interface between a reader and a proximity card. It does not define the application layer a lock runs on top, and it does not promise that any 14443 card will be accepted by any 14443 reader. A tender that cites the standard and stops has specified the physics and left the application open.
Write the mandatory requirement as a transaction instead: the reader population by model, the exchange the card has to complete, the mounting it works through. For hotel estates that means naming the lock platform. Kaway encodes for VingCard, SALTO, dormakaba, Onity and Saflok systems, and in every case the result depends on the chip and on the technical requirements, keys and authorisations of the system. See reading an RFID reader datasheet before specifying cards.
A tender needs two lists, and mixing them is what makes bids impossible to compare. The mandatory list holds what cannot change: the ID-1 format and corner radius of ISO/IEC 7810, the thickness the reader slot accepts, the chip the installed system requires, key ownership, quantity and delivery window. A bid that misses one is out, not discounted.
The evaluated list holds what a supplier may propose: material, print process, surface finish, packaging, delivery split. Each is priced as its own line, so an alternative can be compared without unpicking a single total. A supplier offering recycled PVC with an eighty per cent recycled core, or wooden cards produced at an FSC certified facility (FSC-C195226), shows that as a priced line rather than as a different quotation.
The requirement on neither list is the dangerous one, because it still gets answered by whichever bidder is cheapest. Surface finish is the classic case: unnamed, it arrives as the cheapest laminate on the line. See printing a card and what each finish costs.
The Kaway credential tender schedule is the one page annexe that keeps the two lists honest. It carries four columns and nothing else: the requirement, whether it is mandatory or evaluated, the evidence that satisfies it, and the named owner who accepts that evidence. A requirement with an empty evidence column is not a requirement yet.
Permitted alternatives are reasonable and often cheaper, so the tender has to say what proves one. A datasheet will not: it describes a component in isolation and the question is about a system. The evidence that holds up has three parts: a sample in the buyer's own material and chip, an application trial at the buyer's own readers run by someone with access to them, and a written record of what the trial approved. The record matters because approval is always narrower than it looks, which is the subject of golden samples and what the reference actually approves.
Name the difference the trial has to resolve rather than asking for equivalence in the abstract. MIFARE Classic EV1 1K and MIFARE DESFire EV3 are both ISO/IEC 14443 Type A products, and a lock configured for the first will not read the second without reconfiguration and the system owner's authorisation. EM4200 is read only at 125 kHz; T5577 at the same frequency reads and writes. A bid offering either as a drop in replacement for the other is making a system claim. ISO/IEC 10373-6 supplies the test methods for proximity cards, which gives the trial a published measurement frame instead of an argument.
Most tender delay is not technical. It is an unanswered question about who decides. The tender closes that by naming a person, or a role with a name behind it, against five decisions: who signs off the sample, who runs the trial, who reconciles the encoding file against the delivered cards, who accepts the lot on arrival, and who is notified when the supplier changes something.
Two of the five are routinely left blank. Reader access is the first, and it stalls an otherwise finished evaluation, because the integrator holding the readers is often not the party running the tender. Data reconciliation is the second: a file of numbers goes out, cards come back, and nobody is appointed to check the two match before the cards reach a door. See inspecting a card delivery before you accept it.
Key handling needs its own treatment. A tender that invites key material into a competitive process has created a security problem to solve a procurement one. Ask the ownership question only: who holds the keys, who diversifies them, what the supplier receives. The handover runs in a controlled annexe after award. See blank stock, pre encoded stock, and who holds the keys.
Score compliance in its own stage and close it before any commercial envelope is opened. A bid can meet every technical requirement and still leave sampling, encoding, data processing, inspection or freight outside its price. Opened together, the bid with the most exclusions reads cheapest.
So the exclusions are declared in a format the tender fixes, not in free prose: one row per scope item, two columns for included or excluded, and a price against anything excluded. Normalisation is then arithmetic rather than interpretation. Add each bidder's excluded items back at their own stated prices, then compare.
Keep the quality requirements in this stage, because they are technical. A lot acceptance clause naming a sampling plan is a requirement; an assurance of high quality is not. See card quality plans and how to connect requirements to tests and card sample types and what each sample proves.
The tender defines what counts as a change, because the supplier will not define it the same way. Five things change without anyone intending a change: the chip revision, the inlay construction, the material lot, the print process and the plant that runs the job. Any one of them produces a card that is nominally the same specification and measurably different at the door.
The clause that works is short. Each of the five is notifiable, each notification arrives before the affected run starts, and each one re-opens the acceptance route at the trial step rather than at the sample step. Without it, a gate operator discovers the second batch is different. See specifying the RFID inlay construction interface and making batch two identical to batch one. Ask for the plant in the tender, not after award: Kaway manufactures in its own plant in Dongguan, China, and a bidder who cannot name where the cards are made cannot commit to notifying a change of plant. The record that closes out a supplier approval, and its limits, are covered in the card supplier approval record and its limits.
Illustrative scenario, not a Kaway case study. An estate of 1,400 doors runs a mixed reader population: most doors read MIFARE DESFire EV3, and a wing refurbished later still reads MIFARE Classic EV1 1K. The tender makes both transactions mandatory gates and gives each an evidence column: a sample in the specified material and chip, then a trial at four named doors, two per population.
Three bids arrive. Two accept the trial and offer dates. The third, with the lowest headline price per card, answers the equivalence question with a datasheet extract and the phrase compatible card, and offers no trial. Under price led scoring that bid wins and the problem surfaces at installation. Under the two stage route it is excluded at stage one, because the gate is mandatory and the evidence column is empty. The two remaining bids then separate in stage two, and not where the headline suggested: the cheaper had excluded sampling, encoding, data file preparation and inspection support, and added back at its own prices its total crossed above the other.
Kaway manufactures in its own plant in Dongguan, China, and cards have been manufactured at the Dongguan plant since 2007. The chip list is a closed one: EM4200, T5577, MIFARE Classic EV1 1K and 4K, MIFARE Ultralight EV1, MIFARE DESFire EV2 and EV3, NTAG213, NTAG215 and NTAG216, ICODE SLIX, and UHF Impinj Monza and Alien H3. Encoding is done at the plant: UID reading, sector and block writing where the chip allows it, and NFC encoding with a URL and NDEF on compatible chips.
Three of those facts fill evidence columns in a tender. A sample in your material and chip goes out before any order, so an equivalence claim can be tested rather than asserted. Every chip is read-tested individually before shipping, 100 per cent rather than sampling. Minimum order is 500 units, and standard production is 13 calendar days, 8 calendar days on express and 12 calendar days for wooden cards. Quote requests are answered the same working day. The RFID and NFC cards page lists the frequencies and formats, and the questions worth asking before a supplier reaches a tender list are covered in choosing an RFID card manufacturer.
Not on its own. ISO/IEC 14443 defines the radio frequency interface, so naming it rules out a 125 kHz or UHF product but says nothing about whether a given lock will accept a given card. Name the standard and the transaction at the named reader, and leave the chip as an evaluated option only where the installed system allows alternatives.
Enough to cover each distinct transaction in the mandatory list, rather than a round number. An estate with two reader populations needs samples that can be tried against both. A sample in the buyer's material and chip goes out before any order; the number of samples and the transport cost are quoted per project.
That is what the notifiable change clause is for. A chip revision, an inlay change, a material lot change, a print process change or a change of plant all re-open the acceptance route at the trial step. Written into the tender it costs a notification; discovered later it costs a batch.
About this guide
Published by Kaway Group. The date on this page shows when this guide was last updated. If anything here is out of date, or contradicts what your integrator tells you, tell us and we will correct it.
Ask for a free sample in your material and chip.