RFID: The twelve critical questions retailers have on their work plan.

Every year, for the last ten years, the RFID working group meets virtually four to five times a year, and meets once in person at the annual RFID innovation summit.

Here are twelve of the hottest topics our working group has in scope for our ongoing research and meeting agendas.

1) Defining Inventory Record Accuracy: Recent research suggests that retailers are adopting a number of different definitions as to what is meant by an “accurate” inventory record beyond just the binary definition, is it an exact match (1) or not an exact match (0)?

The group’s research and meeting agendas will seek to understand how retailers define and mean by an accurate inventory record, at the SKU level, and then the different aggregation methods they have adopted. The research will also explore how they display and communicate accuracy metrics across their business, beyond just the finance department.

2) RFID Category Expansion: To date, most retailers have focused their RFID tagging investments in apparel and sports goods, however many retailers are now looking to increase the number of categories where RFID can be applied at source.

Our meetings and benchmark data collection will explore what categories are being added, how those categories have been selected, the support for RFID source tagging from brand owners and the results being delivered.

3) Managing RFID Innovation: For some retailers, once deployed and “up and running”, RFID can quickly evolve into a Business As Usual (BAU) mode, where the motivation for new use cases is low, and the capacity to innovate is limited, as project management resources and IT tech have moved onto new projects. Other retailers though have taken a different path and seek to expand the number of ways the business thinks about and does leverage RFID across their whole supply chain.

Our meetings will hear from retailers who have an ambitious pipeline of innovative use cases planned for trial and deployment across the business and explore with they have organised themselves to constantly engage many and more parts of the business to develop new and more imaginative ways of using RFID in their business.

4) RFID Data to Insight: How are retailers turning RFID data into business insights to help support store operations, loss prevention and replenishment.

In our meetings, we will collect and get to hear from the retailers in the group about their learnings and how RFID data is helping them make better business decisions.

5) RFID Self-Checkout: A near frictionless RFID checkout experience (no scanning required, no hard tags to remove) with exit gates informing the customer and the store as to the exact items that have not been scanned, seems close to an ideal loss prevention “approved” customer journey.

Our research and meetings will investigate and get to learn how retailers have executed such a programme, for example, do you have to have 100% of all items with RFID, and explore then their learnings on “operationalising” self-checkout and its impact on productivity and loss.

6) RFID Smart Gates: A number of retailers, where full POS integration has not yet been implemented, have introduced RFID smart gates to detect specifically what and how many items left the store, through which exit. This allows them to cross check these movements with their POS sales records to identify how many items, at what time of the day, left the store without a payment. Insights from this analysis can then inform loss prevention strategies, not least by understanding exactly what percentage of the total loss can be accounted for by external theft. Leading then to informed discussions on what can be done to prevent the theft of items from the store and recover those goods that were not sold?

Our future meetings will hear from retailers using smart RFID gates and their experience to date, the results, the limitations, and their plans to scale [or not]

7) RFID Tag Form Matters: First, there was RFID in a hard tag, then there was RFID on a swing ticket, then came the RFID in a “care” label, then came embedded RFID and today there is RFID in threads.

Our research and meetings will explore how retailers are transitioning from the more visible and overt forms of RFID tags (hard tags, swing labels, etc) to softer, embedded and more covert forms of RFID tags, such as care labels, threads, etc. What are the impacts on productivity and loss? Does the improvement in productivity offset any uptick in loss?

8) Shielding: What is the current thinking in retailers who have deployed RFID on shielding. Is it still a case of grabbing a paint brush or have retailers adopted the new approaches such as virtual shielding approaches, overhead readers, or other approaches to ensure better visibility per location, especially back-room Vs shop floor.

Our meetings will discuss and share the different ways retailers in the group are managing the need for shielding and interventions, such as virtual shielding.

9) RFID Digital Passports: What does it take to invest behind the Digital Passport programme and what are the expected outcomes and benefits?

Our research and meetings will track this journey towards compliance in 2027, exploring the business case and the executions, with particular interest in the developments on the use of smart devices to read RFID tags.

10) RFID Tunnels: Being able to “read” packages leaving Distribution / Fulfilment centres containing multiple items quickly and accurately can help begin the trail of accountability and visibility to inventory shipped to stores, wholesalers, and shoppers via ecommerce. Equally, these tunnels can begin to record accurately returns from consumers, stores, etc and goods arriving from the DC.

Our research and meetings will get to seek to understand the use of and the benefits of different approaches to “reading” RFID in warehouse including tunnels.

11) DC / FC Inventory Management. DC’s and FC’s are massive open spaces filled with hard for humans to access metal racking, and often the size of ten football pitches and just under a football pitch high.

Our meetings will explore with retailers the technologies they are using to record accurately the inventory being held in these locations using RFID technology.

12) Close the loop with RFID data between supplier, distributer, retailer: For many retailers, even if they have not adopted RFID, much of their inventory will arrive already RFID source tagged.

Our research and meetings will explore how retailers pick up on this opportunity to build their own RFID programmes.

If you would like to join the RFID working group, please click here to learn more about the scope of our work and sign up to the next meetings which are for retailers, brand owners and academics only.