Mar 01, 2016Singapore retailer Decks is employing radio frequency identification to manage inventory and sales transactions at its approximately 35 stores. The RFID technology is provided by SATO. Since the retailer adopted the system eight months ago, it has reduced annual labor hours for stock-taking at all of its stores, from a total of 2,520 hours down to 150, while doing something that the apparel company calls a priority: attracting and retaining qualified employees.
Decks sells fashion apparel—including the Island Shop (which it recently acquired), Beverly Hills Polo Club and Surfers Paradise brands—throughout Singapore in shopping malls and boutiques. The company has a forward-thinking attitude toward technology, says Kelvyn Chee, Decks' managing director. The firm sought not only to have a clearer grasp of what inventory it had at each store and in the distribution center, but also to make it easy for employees to collect that information. In that way, the company could boost sales by ensuring that no products were out of stock, and that they were thus available for customers in stores or online. The retailer began seeking solutions in October 2013.
Prior to the RFID deployment, Decks' DC workers typically required 600 labor hours each year to count stock, achieving an accuracy of about 88 percent. The company decided that RFID would make the stock-counting process faster, could also be used to better track which goods are sold (and, therefore, need to be restocked), and could improve employee retention.
Decks selected a SATO solution to make inventory management an automatic process. SATO employs a hands-on problem-solving approach known as "genbaryoku," in which its teams work closely with customers to identify challenges and issues at their workplace and cooperatively develop solutions, according to Charles Tan, who led the project for SATO Asia-Pacific.
Initially, Decks tagged goods when they were received at the distribution center. But more recently, suppliers began applying EPC Gen 2 passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags at the point of manufacture. According to Chee, the company opted to tag all of its products, even low-value items, in order to provide a uniform system offering visibility into every product.
When suppliers receive an order from Decks, they use a SATO CL4NX printer to print and encode RFID labels for goods to fill that order. The suppliers affix the labels to those items at the factory, and then ship the tagged merchandise to Decks' DC in Singapore.
At its distribution center, Decks has installed a portal made with Zebra Technologies' FX9500 UHF fixed reader and AN480 reader antennas. When goods arrive, staff members use a "goods receiving" function in the SATO software, by following prompts on the reader screen. The tags that are read are all associated with that particular order, and their status is updated as having been received. SATO software is integrated with Decks' existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, so the data is automatically fed to that ERP management system.
This process replaces the previous system, by which each item's bar-coded label had to be scanned, which slowed the receiving process.
When the distribution center ships goods to a store to fill a replenishment order, workers there use the reader portal to interrogate those goods' RFID tags, and the data is updated in the software. Inventory counting at the warehouse is typically performed once annually, and can now be accomplished via a Zebra MC3190-Z handheld reader.
When goods are received at the store, workers there use an MC3190-Z handheld reader to update the software indicating that the goods are at the store. They can then utilize the same handheld whenever conducting an inventory count, by simply walking around the store, capturing tag IDs and forwarding the collected data to the SATO software on Decks' server, to be compared against the existing inventory list. The software can display alerts in the event that the count does not match the expected inventory onsite. That in-store stock counting process takes five to 15 minutes to complete, Chee says.
To make a purchase at any of the stores, a customer proceeds to a self-service kiosk. A Nordic ID Sampo reader built into the kiosk captures the tag ID numbers of the items being purchased. The reader then updates the inventory data to indicate what has been sold, thereby enabling replenishment based on that data.
"We have reduced the time for cashiering," Chee reports, "as we now don't need a cashier to stand at the [cash register]."
Decks installed a Zebra FX7500 fixed reader at each store's exit, replacing the electronic article surveillance (EAS) system that Decks had been using and eliminating the need for separate EAS tags. The reader at the checkout kiosk changes the Electronic Product Code (EPC) on a purchased item's tag. In that way, when the tag is read at the exit, the system will know that the product has been paid for, and the reader will thus not trigger an alert. If the tag ID has not been changed, however, an alert will sound.
Since the solution was taken live in June 2015, Chee says, the company has been experiencing several benefits. The amount of labor required for employees to count inventory has dropped to just a few hours at each store and at the distribution center. "We've drastically reduced the time of stock-counting," Chee says. Since the system went live, the company has lowered stock-counting times at its DC from 600 labor hours down to only five, with an accuracy of 99.8 percent.
Inventory counts at the store, which previously were conducted rarely, can now be completed every week or biweekly, Chee says, because they can be accomplished so quickly. This enables a much higher level of inventory accuracy at each store, he adds, thereby preventing out-of-stocks.
In the long term, Chee adds, the system will help the store attract and retain its employees, since the technology is so much easier to work with than the manual inventory-management method. "Rather than spending time on stock-taking," he states, "they are working with their customers." He adds that "Decks is one of the most technologically advanced companies in Singapore, and we want our staff to stay with our company."
In the future, Chee says, the system will be installed at all of its new stores. The firm is also in the process of integrating the SATO RFID-based software with the store's point-of-sale software. "This will help to increase the productivity of the company and lessen reliance on manpower," Chee says. "It will help the company to easily attract and retain the current workforce."
