Staples Business Depot Sees Big Benefits From RFID Test

Staples staff spent less time receiving shipments using the RFID tagged cases and pallets than they did with the manual method of receiving and physically breaking down the pallets. At the delivery center, RFID-tagged pallets took an average of 2.65 minutes to process, compared with 5.36 minutes for non-tagged pallets received during the same time period. At the Staples store, RFID-tagged pallets took 2.7 minutes to process, as opposed to 17.75 minutes for non-tagged pallets. Pallets generally take more time to process manually in stores than in delivery centers, says Ashcroft, because those sent to stores tend to carry a large number of different products, whereas those sent to delivery centers are more likely to carry just one type of product.

Ninety-five percent of the 62 purchase orders using RFID tags were received at the Staples location on time. When received using the manual receiving process, nine of those same orders (or 15 percent) were delayed, causing them not to be received into the Staples system on the same day they arrived. In total, this represents a loss of 20 selling days for the items in those orders.

Based on the results of the pilot, the participants believe that deploying RFID could enable Staples and its vendors to benefit from more on-time deliveries, through more detailed and automated shipment tracking, and faster processing time for RFID orders—which would, in turn, reduce labor costs.

Ashcroft says the group owes much of the completed pilot's success to its careful planning and synchronization efforts to ensure that the tag data and ASNs were properly routed to Staples' back-end systems. Once the system was set up, he adds, the pilot planners did little verification to make sure the pilot ran as expected. "In the real world," he states, "there will be no babysitting."

According to Ashcroft, the project participants have identified seven other potential pilots, including the use of RFID to reduce product out-of-stocks in Staples stores, and to track and improve promotions management. The retailer may also experiment with tagging products in the Far East, tracking them at each step in the supply chain.