Office
products retailer Staples said it is conducting
an RFID pilot in which store inventory will
be identified with so called “active”
RFID tags that broadcast their position
proactively. The twist: Staples will defray
the normally expensive cost of active tags,
and even item level tagging generally, by
recycling the tags across perhaps several
hundred items as tagged product is sold.
In
a pilot being conducted right now in a Staples
store in Montreal,
a group of a few hundred SKUs is being tagged
with active tags (from Fujitsu). This will
enable a reader network in the stores to
follow the movement of the goods from the
backroom through point of sale. The benefit,
if such a system was rolled out completely:
virtually 100% accuracy in a store’s
perpetual inventory records, and precise
identification of the location within the
store of tagged product, making it easier
for employees to find.
Active tags
proactively broadcast their signals, as
opposed to passive tags (such as the EPC
tags most commonly used for retail supply
chains), which rely on power from the reader
itself to energize the tag and broadcast
the information. As a result, active tags
are much more expensive, as much as $5-8.00
each for this kind of application.
This would
clearly be unaffordable for retail applications
– unless the tags can be reused. That’s
what Staples is trying to do. If a $6.00
tag could be reused 300 times, the cost
per use would be only 2 cents each…
making it very affordable versus the operational
benefits.
The
Staples store in Montreal
conducting the pilot receives virtually
all of its merchandise direct from vendors,
not from a corporate distribution center.
In the pilot, the selected SKU are tagged
as part of the receiving processes, linking
the RFID tag ID to SKU information in the
store inventory database. After the product
has been sold, the tag is removed, and taken
back for reuse.
It is not
clear whether the check-out process automatically
makes the tag ID available again for reuse,
or whether that is another manual step in
the backroom. This would be a critical element
of the total system, as the danger of re-use
is that tag IDs could get out of sync with
the product to which they are actually applied. |