Mar 09, 2016SportLife, a Colombian retailer of athletic shoes, apparel and equipment that operates 38 stores, is one of a handful of companies using the Jungle software-as-a-service (SaaS) RFID solution, provided by Bogota-based technology firm APES. The system enables the retailer to reduce labor costs and inventory out-of-stocks, by tracking the shoes that it sells at all of its stores, as well as in its distribution center. For this service, SportLife pays a monthly fee that includes the use of ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) EPC Gen 2 RFID readers and tags, as well as access to inventory data captured and managed by APES' software on a cloud-based server.
Jungle is designed to be easy to install with limited infrastructure requirements, according to APES. The five-year-old company was launched by students and a teacher at the Colegio de Estudios Superiores de Administración (CESA)—a business school offering undergraduate and graduate programs—to provide management software to retailers, says Daniel Rodriguez, APES' chief customer officer and a co-founder. About two years ago, the firm began building RFID technology into its Jungle system. The company's name is an acronym of the words Accessible Popular Easy Software.
SportLife sells 35,000 to 200,000 products every month. Its distribution center receives its athletic shoes and apparel from brand-name companies, and then forwards those goods to stores. Before the company began using RFID, DC workers carried out selection and shipping manually, and some of the inventory shipped was incorrect—products either ended up missing or were sent to the wrong store. Although SportLife declines to reveal error rates prior to the Jungle installation, APES says the inventory accuracy is now at 99.4 percent.
"We wanted to optimize operational processes," says Sebastian Beltran, SportLife's owner, "such as physical inventory taking, periodic checks thereof, control of movements of goods between stores in terms of quantity and transfer times, and maintenance of an appropriate stock for each of the outlets." The RFID system was taken live six months ago, he reports, adding that inventory checks and transfer (shipping) times are now greatly reduced as a result. For instance, Rodriguez says, it previously took one hour to check 3,000 items to be transferred to stores, but that task takes only seconds using RFID.
According to APES, Jungle is a business solution platform consisting of software on its cloud-based server, known as Silverback, and a Web-based dashboard, known as Kanzi (a male bonobo), that displays data for customers. The app for a handheld reader is dubbed Capuchin (a Central American monkey), while the middleware for fixed readers is called Orangutan.
When SportLife's DC receives goods from suppliers, workers attach an Alien Technology ALN-9720 RFID tag to each item or pair of shoes, and then use a workstation featuring an Alien ALR-9900 fixed reader and two ALR-9686 antennas to encode the tag. With this setup, Rodriguez reports, a single reader can be used to encode as many as 4,000 tags within a single hour.
At the exit to SportLife's distribution center, as well as at each store's entrance, APES installed a Jamison RFID portal with an Alien ALR-9900 reader and ALR-9686 antennas built into it. When products leave the warehouse, and again as they are received at a store, they pass through the portal, which captures the ID numbers of all goods being shipped and then received at that location. This updates the Silverback software, which stores and interprets the data, and feeds that information to the Kanzi dashboard in the cloud-based server.
When conducting an inventory count of products at a store or warehouse, employees utilize the ALR-9011 handheld. They first select a prompt in the Capuchin app to upload all inventory data, then walk through the store or warehouse aisles, reading tag IDs. A single person can complete such RFID counts within 35 minutes, Rodriguez says, based on a store containing 8,000 items. Previously, he notes, the store required its entire staff to work for a day and a half to carry out the count.
SportLife can view details regarding the inventory at all of its stores and its warehouse using the Kanzi Web application, which displays alerts and other information. For example, it can indicate if products need to be reordered or are missing.
Capuchin not only encodes the tags and stores their ID numbers in the Silverback software, but also can enable users to kill or block a tag that has been read using a handheld, by following prompts on that device. SportLife does this with a handheld at the point of sale. In about two months, APES plans to offer a countertop reader to automatically collect the tag IDs of all goods being purchased for inventory updates, and to be used for electronic article surveillance (EAS) purposes at the store exit.
To date, SportLife has used the data specifically for reducing labor times and ensuring that inventory remains accurate, and that products are thus available where a customer needs them, thereby increasing sales. The retailer could also use the Silverback software to better understand which inventory is selling most, or least, in order to make other decisions about products sold at its stores.
"For now, we intend to use RFID as a control mechanism only [for ensuring inventory was in visible and in-stock]," Beltran states. "In the future, the idea is to make it the focus of analysis and have all the information to make all the decisions related to inventory."
Andres Botero, APES' chief sales officer and co-founder, says the SaaS approach is intended to make installations faster and more affordable for retailers. "What we discovered was that RFID was not too successful" for many retailers, he explains, "because of the way it was being sold." Too many companies offer just tags, readers or software integration, he adds, making the process not only confusing for end users, but costly.
APES charges a monthly fee based on the number of units being tagged and tracked. That fee encompasses all hardware, including the tags, along with the server-based data.
In addition, APES has installed the Jungle technology at the sites of several other Colombia companies. These include a leather-goods manufacturer (for monitoring work-in-progress at its factory), an aeronautical firm, a drug maker (for tracking pharmaceutical products), a hotel (for managing linens and fixed assets) and a transportation company (for tracking tires).
