The Second Coming for RFID in Retail: Leading Brands Involved in In-Store RFID Initiatives


BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - January 19, 2011) - According to Aberdeen data, 40% of 125 survey respondents denote that a pilot store is part of their RFID roll-out strategy, and another 10% indicate multi-store deployments. Announced by Aberdeen Group a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS) in the recently released The 2011 Store-Level RFID Benchmark report, consumer goods, apparel, and consumer electronics are the top three product categories that retailers are currently tagging or plan to tag.

Retailers, once driven toward RFID by supply chain partners and other corporate mandates, found those to be unprofitable approaches. Since then, retailers have discovered that RFID implementation yields better results when motivated by in-store operational improvements. "Given the nature of the growth challenges the retail community faces in stores, and the opportunities for operations and customer process improvement, retailers are hungry for a strategic roadmap and a set of leading indicators as they look to innovate and transform their store operations with RFID," says Sahir Anand, author and vice president / principal analyst, retail and banking at Aberdeen. "Both Wal-Mart and Macy's are leading store-level RFID innovation, per recent developments," says Anand.

Russ Klein, author and vice-president, technology group at Aberdeen says, "Store-level RFID data integration with other store, and headquarter retail planning and execution applications emerge as some of the top enablers for a fifth of retailers. As shown in this report through the case study, this enabler is directly impacting inventory performance areas such as accuracy and cycle count time reduction." RFID data integration into inventory processes can facilitate streamlining of inventory data accuracy, simplify inventory compliance processes such as cycle counts, and even inventory shrink reduction due to theft, damage, or other losses that are common in retail.

As in the case of several top apparel retailers (including Dillard's, JC Penney, Marks & Spencer, and Bloomingdales), item-level tagging and the resultant RFID data integration can be unveiled in store formats and test categories to ascertain operational gains and then expand to other categories for desirable results.

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