Falabella Plans Second Item-Level RFID Pilot

There was, however, a discrepancy between the inventory accuracy rate and the RFID read rate that highlighted an important lesson around tagging, he said. For those items with functional tags, the rate of successful reads was 99.7 percent. But because a few RFID inlays were faulty or encoded with incorrect data, and because some hangtags fell off due to being insecurely attached, the inventory accuracy was only 98.4 percent. "The tagged products were more visible during inventory," Astaburuaga explained, "but tags falling off items was a big problem."

IBM developed the project, Astaburuaga noted, and served as its lead implementer. The pilot employed RFID interrogators from Motorola, RFID hangtags supplied by Avery Dennison's Paxar division and OATSystems' Foundation Suite middleware platform.

The middleware controlled the hardware and generated reports based on the tag data. Store staff members used handheld computers to view the restocking reports, which detailed how many of each tagged item were needed on the sales floor to reach optimal floor stock levels.

Astaburuaga said Falabella would now like to begin a second RFID pilot, collaborating with local suppliers of the goods it sells. This trial would involve the tracking of a larger pool of items and include the reading of tags as the goods pass through Falabella's distribution centers. The second pilot, he said, would also include a number of the company's department stores.

Eventually, Astaburuaga said, the company aims to integrate the data collected through RFID tag-read events into existing information systems in the store's back-end operations. This, he stated, will help it achieve additional benefits from the technology that will go beyond what it could provide as a standalone system.