Staples Business Depot Sees Big Benefits From RFID Test

Bell Enterprise Group, an information communications and technology arm of Canadian telecommunications firm Bell Canada, was the systems integrator for the project, working with middleware provider Shipcom Wireless, tag and interrogator provider Symbol Technologies and Zebra, which provided RFID printer-encoders. Marnlen RFID, a designer, manufacturer, and supplier of RFID labels, helped Staples Business Depot find the best-performing RFID tags for its needs. Event-management software from Descartes linked the RFID tag data with Staples' back-end software.

The Supply Chain Network developed two sets of measurement criteria to judge the project's success. Its qualitative metrics were used to determine whether specific goals of the project were met—for instance, whether the interrogation zones functioned properly, and whether the back-end reporting accurately compared results for RFID and non-RFID shipments. The quantitative metrics evaluated whether the project met read rates and other benchmark goals and gauged the extent of improvements over the non-RFID, manual shipping and receiving processes that were conducted and tracked in parallel with the RFID-enabled shipments.

The overall results of the pilot were positive, says Jeff Ashcroft, vice president of logistics and supply chain at PWC Canada's Advisory Services division and leader of the Supply Chain Network. All of the qualitative criteria were met, as were all but one of the quantitative criteria. The read-rate benchmark of RFID tags attached to pallets and cases of inbound goods at the Staples locations was set at 99.9 to 100 percent, but the actual rate was 97.41 percent.

Ashcroft notes that the tag read rate actually translates to an overall receipt accuracy of 99.2 percent for the tagged shipments. This is because, for the purposes of the test, only the pallet tag's ID, which correlates with a list of all the cases on the pallet, was utilized to receive the goods into the delivery center or store's inventory system. Thus, the pilot met its target of a receiving variance of 1 percent or lower between the results of RFID-enabled receiving and manually receiving.

To test the effectiveness of the RFID system against the current manual receiving process, the test pallets were received by capturing their tag data as they moved through interrogation portals, comparing the tag data with the ASN and comparing that with the purchase order to ensure the shipment was complete. As a check, and to provide a timing comparison, the company also manually broke the pallets down and read each case's bar code.