Nine West Joins The Item-Level RFID Trial Club. But Will It Graduate?
Written by Eric AthasAugust 14th, 2008
Have item-level RFID trials become the industry's Roach Motel? A place where trials check in but they don't check out?
On Monday (Aug. 11), the $3.8 billion Jones Apparel Group became the latest retailer to launch an RFID item-level trial, albeit a conservative one, testing it at "a couple" of the 221 stores it operates under the Nine West name, said Norm Veit, executive VP of Management Information Services at Jones.
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One Comment | Read Nine West Joins The Item-Level RFID Trial Club. But Will It Graduate?
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-Christine
August 20th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
After reading all the comments by experts on the failure of RFID to advance beyond the pilot stage, I come away with the distinct feeling that it’s a smoke screen used to cover up the obvious fact that Passive RFID, in the supply chain, has failed to perform.
You state that “The lure of item-level RFID is legendary, but to make it work requires deep penetration into quite a few systems.†What is the lure of RFID in the supply chain?
The primary data element in retail for many years is the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). When first introduced, systems were developed that required keyboard entry of the SKU and associated data.
The introduction of Barcode, and the UPC Number was easily integrated because of the one for one relationship between UPC and SKU. The advantage of barcode came from the replacement of the laborious and error prone keyboard entry with a hand-held barcode scanner.
The lure of item-level RFID is the promise of group reading, which eliminates the need to scan barcode items one at a time. Since the SKU can easily be derived from the EPC encoded in the RFID tag, integration should be no more difficult than the introduction of the earlier barcode and UPC.
So why do RFID pilots never checkout of the “Roach Motel� Aside from the high cost of the tag, group reading has been found to be unreliable and error prone. Without the savings and speed of group reading, the cost of the tag cannot be justified and any improvement beyond hand scanning is minimal.
Redesigning existing systems to compensate for the low read rate is a costly and useless exercise. I believe this is what is meant by the phrase “to make it work requires deep penetration into quite a few systems.†If a reader could derive the SKU for every item presented, integration would be a trivial task.