Tracking inventory at Mammoth Outdoor Sports, located in California’s Sierra Nevada, is no small task, as the company sells merchandise via a variety of venues. The firm operates a central 30,000-square-foot warehouse that serves its three retail stores, as well as exhibitions where it sells its products, and a busy Internet-based business. To manage its inventory—such as apparel, footwear, snowboards, ski equipment, camping gear and bikes—at all of these locations, and to do so using a single, centralized system, the retailer has employed an RFID-based solution provided by Truecount.
At its warehouse, located in the city of Bishop, Mammoth Outdoor Sports has traditionally separated its inventory into two categories: merchandise sold at the brick-and-mortar stores or at exhibitions, and goods sold online. This practice helps to ensure against out-of-stocks, the company reports, but requires the storage and management of excess inventory. “We wanted to more accurately know our inventory on a daily basis [in the warehouse, as well as at retail stores], and we wanted more flexibility,” says Phil Hertzog, Mammoth Outdoor Sports’ co-owner and managing director. That flexibility would come from managing all of its merchandise in one unified way, so that both the Internet and store sales teams used the same product inventory.
Hertzog also wanted the system to reduce shrinkage. Since merchandise moves to and from multiple locations (especially if it is taken to an exhibition requiring that goods be transported to and from another state), product often ends up missing, and it is difficult to trace where it was lost. Hertzog hoped for a solution that could determine much more quickly where the inventory is located, and when it vanishes, thereby identifying and addressing when shrinkage occurs and who may be responsible.
The company began testing the technology one year ago. It installed the Truecount solution in March 2012 at all three of its stores (one called Mammoth Outdoor Sports, and other two Valuesports), as well as at its warehouse.
Smartrac G2iL Belt passive EPC Gen 2 RFID tags (model SC3001964) are first printed and encoded on a Zebra Technologies RZ400 RFID printer, and are then applied to new products arriving at the warehouse. Each tag ID is linked to that item’s stock-keeping unit (SKU) in Truecount’s RFID Essentials software, residing on Mammoth Outdoor Sports’ back-end system. The company has applied tags to all pieces of merchandise, for a total of 100,000 tagged items to date. The system updates the status of available inventory. If an item is shipped to one of the stores, its tag is interrogated using a handheld Motorola Solutions MC3090-Z reader before it is loaded onto a truck bound for that destination. A similar process is employed for loading vehicles headed for an exhibition, such as a snowboard show or another event at which the retailer sells products.
Once goods are received at one of the stores, a handheld reader is used to interrogate each tag and update its status as received. On a daily basis, staff members can then carry the handhelds throughout the store and read all tags, performing a daily inventory check.
Truecount’s software is integrated with Mammoth’s existing Retail Star point-of-sale (POS) system, provided by CAM Commerce Solutions. This enables it to capture data regarding each piece of merchandise as its tag is read when that item is sold, and to then compare that information against the Retail Star software data.
In the event that an item turns up missing during an inventory check, a worker can begin searching for it, and store managers will have a record indicating on which day that product was lost, as well as at which location and who was working on that day.
When product returns from an exhibition, the POS information for the items sold at that location is automatically compared against the tags read as the returned products are received at the store. If something is missing, the system knows at which exhibition it disappeared, and who was responsible for those goods.
Every POS terminal within each store also comes equipped with a Motorola DS9808-R hybrid bar-code scanner and RFID reader (see RFID News Roundup: Motorola Unveils Bar-Code-RFID Point-of-Sale Reader), to record which items are sold.
Inventory checks performed at each location now take two employees carrying a handheld reader through the store less than one hour to complete, Hertzog says. “It creates so much visibility into the system,” he states, that it tends to act as a deterrent to those who might otherwise steal product. “Everyone [among the staff] knows that we’re looking—they’re aware of what we’re doing.” There has been almost no shrinkage since the system was taken live, he says.
The solution also enables the company to store all inventory together at its central warehouse, whether goods are destined for an Internet sale or to a brick-and-mortar store, because inventory data is precise enough to indicate when merchandise needs to be reordered, based on daily sales numbers.
One key challenge facing Truecount, says Zander Livingston, the company’s CEO and cofounder, “was that the location is fairly remote—it’s a four-hour drive from the nearest airport—so we had to ensure that we could support them logistically during the installation and training.” The software integration posed its own challenges, he notes. “We had to integrate with Retail Star, so there were some challenges in making sure that the two systems [Mammoth’s POS software and Retail Star] could speak to each other as seamlessly as possible.”