Jan 22, 2013Throughout the past year, French fashion brand Façonnable has been piloting Tagsys RFID's Fashion-item Tracking System (FiTS) to attain visibility into its supply chain. The company is now adding the solution to all 70 of its stores, as well as at three third-party distribution centers.
The deployment includes Tagsys' EPC Gen 2 ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) garment hangtags, Tagsys' new HHU-500 handheld readers (featuring an integrated antenna), an SRU-400 point-of-sale (POS) reader, the SPU-500 electronic article surveillance (EAS) station and e-connectware software to manage read data.
Façonnable, an international high-end clothing designer founded in Nice, France, operates locations throughout the world. With the goals of gaining greater visibility into its products' supply chain, from distribution center to stores, and of better preventing theft, the company began considering various RFID solutions approximately a year ago. The firm tested Tagsys' technology before launching the expansion to all of its locations, with every store expected to be using RFID by March 2013.
"We want to drive better efficiency and visibility throughout our entire global supply chain," says Yonni Mrejen, Façonnable's VP of retail and operations. To accomplish this objective, he explains, the company sought a method for viewing each item from the moment of manufacture to the point of sale. The company has three third-party distribution centers within three countries, as well as stores on multiple continents, so Mrejen says it was essential to have a single integrated system to tie together all inventory-related data. "The Tagsys system offers us that kind of control," he states.
Hangtags with embedded RFID tags are being attached to garments at the factory where the goods are manufactured, after which the clothing is boxed and sent to a distribution center. As boxes of merchandise arrive at one of the RFID-enabled DCs, a Tagsys UHF Tunnel reader captures each tag's ID number. The tags are then read again when the DC ships the goods to a store. The reader data is transmitted via a cabled connection to a PC connected to a Façonnable server running Tagsys' e-connectware software, thereby updating each product's status as its tag is read as having been received at the DC.
When a store orders goods, workers at the DC pack those items into boxes that are passed through the UHF Tunnel reader. The device interrogates each tag, verifying which items are being shipped.
Once the boxes of merchandise arrive at the store, employees use the handhelds to read all tags within the boxes before the garments are unpacked, in order to document all goods received. They then unpack the goods within the back room, or move them directly to the sales floor. The staff can also periodically use the handheld readers for inventory purposes.
When an item is sold, a reader at the point of sale captures that event and links the product's ID with the data in Façonnable's POS software. In this way, the company maintains a record of which items were sold, and can thus automatically replenish those goods. What's more, the customer checkout process is made faster, since each item's bar code need not be scanned.
"This is one of the most sophisticated solutions using RFID in the retail space," says Alain Fanet, Tagsys' CEO, due to the integration of stores around the world with third-party DCs on several continents, all sharing data with the company's single enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Not only were multiple companies involved (including the third-party DCs), he explains, but adding one new store to the system at a time was challenging, to ensure that other store data traffic was not compromised during those installations.
"Coordination between all the partners was very complex," Fanet says. "Project management was the biggest challenge. The good news is that we know now how to accommodate such a client."
Mrejen agrees that it is not a simple task to align all of the internal constituencies and external suppliers around a single strategy. "And, of course, there are physical deployment challenges of being a widely distributed operation," he states. "We are satisfied with how the deployment is progressing, and it seems to be working as we had hoped, but it's too soon to talk about longer-term results."
