Finnish Fashion Designer Begins Item-Level Tagging

By Claire Swedberg

Nov. 23, 2007—Finnish clothing designer Naisten Pukutehdas (NP) has begun an RFID rollout to track its NP Collection garments. Implemented in August, the system is helping the company track goods manufactured in Eastern Europe as they arrive at its distribution center and six retail locations in Finland.

Naisten Pukutehdas sells women's fashion, marketed under the NP Collection brand, at 500 retail locations throughout parts of Scandinavia and Russia. The company is now in the process of opening its own stores as well—it currently owns and operates six such stores, and expects to have 10 in 2008. NP's clothes are manufactured at multiple factories in various locations, owned and operated by third parties, with half of its clothes made in Eastern Europe and the other half in China.

Risto Rosendahl

NP has installed its RFID supply chain management system at the six stores and distribution center it operates in Finland, as well as at one factory in Estonia. All the Eastern European factories, however, attach tags containing UPM Raflatac EPC Gen 2 RFID inlays to garments they ship, says Risto Rosendahl, managing director of systems integrator and software provider Rosendahl Digital Networks (RDN). NP first began testing the system in June 2007.

At the Estonia factory, workers attach an RFID tag—created and pre-encoded with a unique Electronic Product Code (EPC) by apparel packaging company SML Group—to each garment. The workers link the tag's EPC to other data they input, such as the outfit's size, style and color. The data is then stored in NP Collection's own ERP data management system. Rosendahl estimates that in 2008, there will be 250,000 garments tagged. The Estonian factory reads the tags of the items it is about to ship to NP's distribution center, then sends an advance shipping notice (ASN).

NP's distribution center uses fixed readers provided by ADT Security Services to capture the tags' EPC numbers as the shipments arrive and leave the center. RDN's Business Set software suite translates data on its centralized Web-based server so it can be transferred to NP's ERP system. As the products leave the distribution center, ASNs are automatically transmitted to retail shops via the Internet, providing the stores with time to plan shelf space before the goods arrive.