Phone-Tracking Pilot Down Under Points to Big Benefits

"So we prepared a business case, but soon determined that there were a number of other benefits from rolling out RFID," Marchand explains. "This included short-term benefits, such as increased productivity by reducing the amount of time staff spent in the stockroom receiving phones or looking for phones—all time spent away from customers. But we could also see potential long-term benefits, such as improved accuracy of stock levels, eliminating incidents of being out of stock and minimizing over-supply of stock."

In launching the trial, Telstra prepared a set of key performance indicators to be met, such as the time spent receiving goods in store, stock-taking and searching for missing phones. Telstra Enterprise & Government worked with NEC to develop the system for the trial. An RFID smart label featuring a passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) EPC Gen 2 tag operating at 920 to 926 MHz was attached to the packaging of some 12,800 mobile phones.

RFID interrogators were installed in the DC and six retail outlets.

RFID interrogators were then installed in the DC and six retail outlets. Telstra experimented with a number of set-ups in order to determine which provided the best read rates, including placing readers at the retail store's stock-room door and entrance ceiling, at the stock-room door and entrance gate, and at the stock-room door and point of sale. "The preferred set-up for read-rate performance and aesthetics purposes," Marchand says, "was putting the readers at the stock-room door and on the ceiling at the entrance, with the readers integrated into point-of-sale IT systems."

All readers connect to a central server, and information is sent over Telstra's own LAN or Next G network. Information is made available to the staff via a Web-based portal Adaptive Asset Manager (AAM), designed by NEC and customized by Telstra Enterprise & Government, thus providing Telstra with immediate access to such data as inventory levels, goods lost in transit and transit time—which, in turn, could trigger alarms for such events as delayed delivery or out-of-stocks.

The immediate benefits were dramatic, Marchand says, with the automated capture of all items passing through the various read points resulting in visibility of up to 99 percent of all items shipped, received and moved within the stores.