Sep 09, 2014For the past two years, BT Trace, a division of British Telecommunications (BT), has been offering RFID-based solutions to its customers.
BT Trace first launched in October 2012, with a product portfolio known as BT Supply Chain Solutions. The portfolio included multiple solutions offered regionally, before the firm renamed its products as BT Trace, with specific vertical markets established to meet customer needs. In addition to BT Trace for Retail, the company offers BT Global Trace for Supply Chain Visibility, BT Asset and BT Inventory Trace (for use with both bar-code and RFID technologies) and BT Trace for Health (to track mobile assets at hospitals via radio frequency identification).
BT Trace for Retail enables the customization of each deployment based on the needs of a particular retailer. This approach of customizing the solutions is aimed at boosting the adoption and success rates of RFID for retailers in Europe and globally.
One of BT Trace's clients is a global, luxury garment retailer that is currently in the process of tagging millions of its products with EPC ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags as part of an item-level RFID deployment using handheld readers to ensure that store shelves worldwide are replenished when necessary, and that goods are never out of stock. At five of its North American stores, at which the technology was initially trialed for three months during the summer of 2013, the company reported that sales and gross margin both increased by five percent, thanks to improved inventory accuracy at those locations. The retailer is now tagging goods sold at other stores in various countries around the world, and is providing those stores with handheld readers. During the three-month pilot, the retailer tagged 1.6 million items. Since then, it has tagged another 5.5 million and has trained 300 store employees to use the technology.
The pilot and the deployment that followed illustrate the kind of customized solution at which BT Trace excels, according to Keith Sherry, BT Trace's director of business development for supply chain. For one thing, he says, the pilot was carefully orchestrated to include the training of personnel regarding the technology, and included biweekly meetings between participating stores in order to share learnings.
Prior to launching the RFID system, the retailer reported to BT Trace that its staff struggled to ensure the shelves were properly stocked while simultaneously providing personal assistance to customers. Typically, each store received several thousand customers daily, and maintained an inventory of 50,000 items for sale. The best way to ensure that the shelves were stocked, Sherry says, was to conduct regular merchandise counts, but the manual process counts generally took two workers four hours to complete for a single product category (BT Trace does not say how many categories a store typically has).
The version of BT Trace for Retail that the retailer is using consists of BT Trace software, a variety of UHF EPC RFID tags selected based on cost and form-factor for different garment types, and Motorola Solutions' MC3190Z handheld readers. Employees use the readers to identify missing items, or to search for a specific garment.
During the pilot, the retailer found that two workers could use the handhelds to count an inventory of 50,000 items within 45 minutes. The stores also found that customers were buying more items per transaction, presumably because a greater number of products, in the proper size, color or style, were available on the shelves.
According to Sherry, the BT Trace for Retail solution includes several features aimed at making item-level tagging in the retail sector more successful. For each of its clients, the company completes a professional services study utilizing what Sherry calls a comprehensive and sophisticated modelling tool to determine what that customer needs, and what would meet those requirements effectively and inexpensively.
"That's one thing that's driven success for us," Sherry states, "and for the adoption of RFID."
BT Trace urges its clients to employ a variety of EPC tags to fit the form factors of garments and their labels, rather than become locked into working with a specific tag vendor. Often, Sherry says, retailers focus too heavily on the cost of the RFID software, "but that's one-tenth of the investment. Most of the money is going into the tags." As such, he notes, ensuring that the lowest-cost tags are used effectively is critical. The global retailer that piloted the system at five of its North American stores took advantage of that option, using multiple vendors—not only for tag size and shape, but also for cost.
The RFID company says it focuses on a holistic approach that includes not only inventory tracking, but also customer engagement, both of which can be abetted by RFID technology. A single solution could be installed, for instance, to not only track the locations of goods on shelves or in backrooms, but also enable customers to view more details about particular products, or pay to purchase them.
In addition, BT Trace is offering solutions based on tagging at distribution and manufacturing points, in order to meet the retail industry's changing demands. For instance, Sherry says, fast-moving fashion (the effort to move garments quickly from the design phase to customers for a short period of time) is driving RFID's adoption at an early point in the supply chain, thereby making it possible to better understand where goods are located between factory and store. Tagging at the source also helps retailers and brands promote their ethical sourcing (proving that products were manufactured in an ethical way by ethical parties), says Alison Wiltshire, BT Trace's global propositions director for retailing and consumer engagement. In this case, companies can prove to consumers where goods were made—and, therefore, under what conditions, as well as possibly the materials and fabric treatment that might have been used.
In past years, Sherry says, various software firms have provided RFID solutions to a number of retailers that have launched pilots that, in many cases, failed to lead to full deployments because those retailers could not see a clear return on investment. In contrast, he adds, BT Trace focuses the RFID solutions it provides on a specific user's unique needs—in terms of both hardware and software requirements and scaleability—for a holistic approach that addresses inventory management, customer engagement, supply chain management and, finally, ethical sourcing.
BT Trace, Sherry reports, is presently in various phases of deployment of such solutions with multiple retailers.
