Keeping a store running successfully today is about much more than putting products on the shelves. New and innovative technologies are now a requirement to remain competitive. An RFID solution is one of them. What can you gain by deploying this technology in your store? We looked into it and saw a real-world example from Zebra Technologies and Mieloo & Alexander.
In a retail environment, it’s not infrequently a rather cluttered environment. One reason for this is that there is usually a store area and a warehouse. And those two parts have to work together optimally for the store as a whole to function optimally. As a retailer, you prefer to know where your products are located in as much detail as possible. Are they in the store, do they just need to be restocked from the warehouse or have they already passed the checkout and thus sold?
At first glance, the above questions may not seem enormously tricky to answer. Yet, in practice, in many cases, this is something that causes headaches for retailers. After all, this means that you want to know where a product is at any time of the day. In a store where the throughput of products is low, for example, because it has a very exclusive and limited supply, you can keep track of that manually just fine. With serious volumes going through warehouses and stores, however, this is virtually impossible. This is extremely important for retailers to replenish on time, both in the store and warehouse.
Knowing what you have
If you want to gain insight and an overview of the entire journey of products you sell in your store, it obviously starts with accurately knowing what you have on hand. This is already a first hurdle in many warehouses. If they are filled to the ceiling with products, it is virtually impossible to create a good inventory entirely manually. You can’t reach everything, so you will eventually have to make some assumptions and estimates. With that, you immediately lose the accuracy and, therefore, the correct insight and overview.
In addition to ‘old-fashioned’ manual work in determining inventory, you can, of course, use tools. But these tools run into the same problems if you have to handle all the products in the warehouse individually. For example, a standard scanner will not help you significantly here. You need physical access to the barcode on a product or a box of products. And so this is often not possible.
The consequences of this lack of overview are pretty hefty. If you manually inventory products, you initially have a reasonably accurate picture of your inventory. After a few months, however, this drops to an accuracy of 70 per cent. That impacts optimizing your sales as a retailer that cannot be underestimated. In short, it would be helpful if this could be improved. That is certainly possible, according to Zebra Technologies and Mieloo & Alexander, thanks to the deployment of RFID and the software that goes with it. With it, it is possible to get above 98 per cent regarding inventory accuracy.
Complete RFID portfolio
In this article, we talk about the added value of the Zebra SmartLens Overhead Readers that Mieloo & Alexander hung at the retail chain. However, Zebra’s RFID portfolio is much larger than that. In addition to RFID hand readers, it has fixed RFID readers that you can hang at a strategic point in an aisle, for example. We also saw the latter in the case study as chokepoint readers. Furthermore, Zebra also has a whole range of RFID antennas. The SmartLens Sensing Network Appliance is an example of this and, as far as we can tell, the most advanced, but there are many more. There are antennas for specific industries, as well as antennas for outdoor use, for example. The final link for RFID hardware is, of course, RFID tags. Zebra has solutions for that, too, in the form of RFID printers and the supplies for those printers.
Zebra is not just about hardware these days; however, software is getting more and more attention as well. Not surprisingly, the company also has software for RFID readers. This includes software that makes it easy to get started with RFID readers, as well as SDKs in case organizations develop their own applications specifically for their environments.
The added value of RFID
Radio-frequency ID, or RFID, as the name implies, uses radio waves to scan RFID tags. Radio waves do not require line-of-sight to scan tags, something you need with a standard scanner. In addition, radio waves carry farther than the light waves you use to scan with those types of scanners. So you don’t have to be extremely close to the tags to be scanned with an RFID scanner, either. The range of such a scanner can go towards tens of meters, depending, of course, on the specific environment.
Buying RFID readers alone is not enough. These devices must also have something to scan. For that, you need (active or passive) RFID tags. It may be tempting to dismiss these tags as a type of barcode, but that is incorrect. Where barcodes designate a product range, each RFID tag is unique. This is certainly a substantial difference for use in a store we discussed above. Namely, you can now track the journey of each product. With a barcode, you can track the journey of a box of many of the same products. That’s a lot less convenient for your inventory management.
Once you have RFID-tagged all your products, you can use an RFID reader to scan serious numbers of products per second. Zebra Technologies and Mieloo & Alexander say this involves between 800 and 1,000 products per second. This has the advantage that you can scan your entire inventory very quickly. And that, in turn, allows you to do it more often. The result is the 98 per cent accuracy we mentioned above.
RFID raises new questions
In theory, RFID makes it possible to track inventory much better. That makes it possible to monitor this inventory in near real-time. In the example of a store, this allows you to move toward a situation where you immediately replenish a shelf or rack in the store the moment an item is sold. However, you don’t have this set up that way overnight. In other words, the deployment of RFID also brings new issues.
The main disadvantage of RFID is also the biggest advantage. Radio waves can cover a relatively large distance. This is very nice if you want to scan RFID tags in a warehouse from a central location. However, this also means that the signal passes through walls. Of course, that’s not what you want if you have a warehouse and a store floor. Then, you want to scan only the products in the store and the warehouse. By default, that’s not possible with an RFID reader or scanner. So you have to come up with something for that.
A second issue surrounding the deployment of RFID is how to get as much value as possible from an investment. You can think about automating processes even further. On the one hand, that means also working with additional (IoT) software on top of the RFID hardware. This is necessary to have and keep optimal insight. In addition, you can also take steps to make the environment function almost autonomously. For example, it is possible to retire handheld scanners and have the scanning done by overhead scanners.
RFID in practice
Now that we have covered the theory surrounding the added value of RFID and the new questions it raises, it is time to look at a real-world example. To do so, we delved a little deeper into what Zebra Technologies and Mieloo & Alexander accomplished at and together with a global player in the fashion industry.
The goal of the collaboration was to use Zebra and Mieloo & Alexander’s technologies to gain greater insight into the journey that products take within the retail supply chain and, in doing so, improve the supply chain as a whole. Zebra provided the hardware, while Mieloo & Alexander, as system integrators, was responsible for delivering a functioning environment.
Substantial increase in accuracy
Based on the figures in the case study we reviewed, Zebra and Mielo & Alexander succeeded in the above setup. The result of the collaboration between the two parties and the client is an accuracy rate exceeding 98 per cent. As indicated, you do not achieve such a score without investing in RFID scanners alone. So-called chokepoint readers were placed in several places in the retailers’ stores. These RFID readers hung in strategic locations allow them to see exactly how a product goes through the store. There is one that separates the warehouse and store, but also in other places, such as at the cash register and the door to the outside.
At this point, however, the result was still not above 98 per cent. That only came when Mielo & Alexander added a SmartLens Sensor from Zebra to the stores. Indeed, the chokepoint readers were still occasionally missing an RFID tag. This meant that, especially in very busy stores, stock still had to be scanned manually with handheld scanners regularly. These SmartLens Sensing Network Appliances brought the accuracy past 98 percent. It was also then no longer necessary to manually go to work with RFID scanners.
Not just for retailers
In the body of the article, we chose retail as the starting point for talking about RFID. This is partly because a retail environment is familiar to many people and partly because we wanted to work toward the case study of Zebra and Mieloo & Alexander. However, RFID is certainly also important if you want to optimize things in other environments. Basically, RFID can play a role in any environment where you want to know the location of items that are critical to your operations.
The manufacturing industry comes up pretty quickly when you start thinking about other environments for RFID. You also have inventory that you need to keep track of. There, you can also put RFID tags on equipment and tools to keep good track of where everything is. There is a similar application for healthcare. We have sometimes heard that in hospitals, most of the equipment is constantly lost. You can monitor that much better through RFID.
In addition to the manufacturing and healthcare industries, Zebra’s RFID portfolio also targets the transportation and logistics sector, hospitality, warehouses and Field Service Management, where, for example, you also want to give mobile maintenance workers optimal insight into what they’re doing.
Refilling software
In addition to hardware in the form of RFID readers and tags, a retail chain like the one in the case study needs software. After all, there is also the need to do some behind-the-scenes work to replenish inventories properly. That’s what Mieloo & Alexander’s Araneo Refilling Task Management System was used for. This software records all products leaving the store through integration with RFID readers. This even applies to products that are stolen.
Such registration is important because this is the only way for store employees to know which products need to be restocked without having to check this themselves manually and with their own eyes continuously. Even if a customer wants to buy something that is no longer on the shelves but is still in the warehouse, thanks to this software, you can quickly switch and still sell the product to the customer.
Fast results
Timely restocking and being able to switch very quickly when a customer wants to buy something that is no longer on the shelves results in more sales for the retail chain. This, coupled with the enormous time savings from deploying RFID in combination with the software, means that the chain had recouped its investment in hardware and software within ten weeks. And that, ultimately, is what a customer like this retail chain judges parties like Zebra and Mieloo & Alexander on. Especially important to highlight in the future is the addition of the Zebra SmartLens Sensors. For example, a product’s journey through the warehouse and store can become completely digital. And digital means more insight and, thus, higher sales.
Tip: Zebra Technologies acquires machine vision expert Matrox Imaging