By Bob Violino

Mar. 16, 2009—Sam's Club, the wholesale division of Wal-Mart Stores, asked its suppliers to tag pallets with ultrahigh-frequency RFID tags based on EPCglobal's Electronic Product Code standards beginning on Jan. 31, 2008. Suppliers that failed to do so would be charged $2 (or more) per pallet because Sam's Club would have to add the tags at its own distribution centers. Many suppliers chose the $2 route. Most suppliers that tagged their own pallets opted for the easiest and least expensive approach—"slap-and-ship," in which a label containing an EPC RFID tag with the correct serial number is manually placed on a case or pallet just before it's shipped.

Now Sam's Club suppliers are faced with another EPC RFID tagging mandate: Tag all "sellable units" that are bound for the wholesaler's DeSoto, Texas, distribution center by Oct. 31, 2009. And Sam's Club wants all of its suppliers to tag all sellable units by Oct. 31, 2010.


If you've taken the $2 or slap-and-ship route, you might not be worrying about how to meet these new tagging requirements. But you should be thinking about it—now. Tagging sellable units will require a lot more work than tagging pallets. Just how much work is involved will depend on how many stock-keeping units (SKUs) you ship to Sam's Club and in what quantities, as well as what kind of products you manufacture. Tagging items with metal or liquids will be more difficult than tagging, say, socks or bread.