Sure, NFC tags or whatever are one way.
Barcodes and a scanner, don't need any programming, just print out the tags. Simpler?
The traditional industrial version of what you describe, I think would run everything through a PLC; I've seen things like this were there's a touch screen with widgets controlled by the PLC, and, something stuff happens, there's your tag and whatever.
Lower level would a microcontroller doing everything, but that'll take a lot more development than using the rPi; and if you suddenly need network or database access, good luck with that!
Easier would probably be a PC and some scripts; the tags might read out via COM port, and that can basically be ran through some basic scripts (maybe not batch files, but pretty much any proper scripting language will do).
Doing exactly that, on a rPi (a PC on a board, after all), would definitely do.
Overkill? Sometimes not.

Tim