In today’s market, the RFID landscape is coming of age. Solution providers have zeroed in on the application expertise while software vendors now provide field-proven, retail-specific applications. Motivated by the development of industry standards, Major technology organizations such as Oracle, Intel, and Microsoft have begun to make significant investments, which places standard, interoperable RFID within the grasp of more users. Today, tags come in a variety of shapes and sizes, enabling tagging of any merchandise, product, or application at a low cost and high return on investment.
Advancements in RFID Technology
With the significant performance development in RFID, hardware has led to a leap in capability and drastically revolutionized read rates. As result, it has made previous untouchable applications more effective and economically appealing to users. Now, the market is beginning to flourish with new applications based on a higher utility of UHF Gen2 RFID Technology.
UHF Gen2 RFID Technology is providing retailers with new opportunities to reduce costs, boost consumer satisfaction and raise revenue. The new-age RFID landscape enables organizations to access to more accurate and frequent inventory data. This allows both retailers and vendors to improve product availability and cut back on inventory costs. Brand authentication technology enables a sophisticated and highly effective method for safeguarding high-value products is the real thing. Moreover, it ensures that the product is not a knock-off – protecting both brand and customer satisfaction. Promotional display deployment tracking provides high-impact marketing and high ROI on marketing dollars. Asset tracking applications ensure efficient capital usage and accurate billing for pooled assets like pallets. In the end, RFID is leading to higher revenue and profits for retailers and vendors alike.
The Rise of RFID Tags
The firms use RFID tags for in-store management; thus it’s becoming one of the smartest investments a retailer can make. Increased shelf accuracy makes it easier for consumers to find what they want – to, in return. As a result, customers buy more – and new services, such as online orders with in-store pickup, which improves repeat purchases.
As we look deeper into the retail market, it is important to consider there are several types of retailers, store formats, product categories, and operational models. Also, in the case of these strategies, it would make the most sense for firms to implement RFID technology. Nearly a third of retailers are using RFID for both store fulfillment and also to allow staffing to check on product availability, location, price, and quantity. Therefore, this goes to show that RFID can also become an essential component of an Omni-Channel program.
The Omni-Channel Landscape
The Omni-Channel landscape is becoming one of the most promising areas of growth for retailers. For many, this would require implementing a strategy where they can treat all of their inventory as one giant pool — allowing products to be readily available for confirming consumer’s orders from anywhere – online, in-store, via call centres. This deft supply chain management capability requires highly accurate inventory information to guarantee the reliability of the order-promising process. Improved inventory accuracy enables retailers to confidently provide them item stock availability to consumers on all platforms. Improved real-time inventory accuracy, by item and location, is RFID’s prime contribution towards enabling a more effective Omni-Channel landscape.
A common trend witnessed by the market is fast ROI after the successful implementation of RFID technologies. For many retailers, this is based on products with a high mix of the complexity of merchandise like size, color, and style. Also, followed into intensive items in apparel such as footwear, cosmetics, sporting goods, and fragrances. What these categories have in common is the need to keep many different variations on display. With RFID staff personnel will coordinate the proper products to be restocked and ready. As a result, when a consumer walks into the store, they find what they are looking for. Therefore, the primary driver here is very tangible – sales uplift resulting from on-floor availability.
Benefits of RFID Technology
RFID has come a long way in the last few years. Standards have been established. Pricing for systems and tags has dropped and RFID technology has become more dependable. Moreover, read rates and ranges are much higher, as technologies and techniques to deal with metals and liquids are developed. Software applications that can be integrated into retailers’ IT infrastructure and that are user-friendly at the store level are now available. Solution providers and systems integrators have much more experience with retail RFID and integrating into operational systems. Many more experienced implementers understand the pitfalls and how to avoid them. RFID solution providers have evolved to more of a complete solution approach, rather than requiring such heavy lifting components by component integration, engineering, and customization.
But perhaps most important has been the end-users’ accumulation of expertise and deftness in understanding the different uses and the ability to derive a compelling ROI. They have realized that ultimately success is not about the technology, but understanding what to do with the new data, capabilities, and insights—what business and process changes can be made that have the most value for a retailer’s particular set of products and operating model.
Written By: Vic Bageria
CEO – Xpandretail