NTK Confecções, a clothing business located in the neighborhood of Bras, in São Paulo City, Brazil, manages such brands as Fatal, aimed at young shoppers. The company has adopted radio frequency identification (RFID) technology provided by iTAG Etiquetas Inteligentes, which it deployed in May 2021. Following a successful first few months of using RFID, the firm has decided to expand the deployment to all areas of its business, including other brands it owns and manages.
The company was founded more than 20 years ago. It now has 280 employees and produces 350,000 apparel items per month. According to Eduardo Agenor Leite, NTK’s logistics and operations manager, RFID was already on its radar for more than two years before NTK deployed the technology in its operations. “The market seeks to do more with less,” he explains. “At NTK, we want to do much more with what we have at our disposal, and RFID is part of the company’s strategy.”
Leite says his company greatly evolved without much technology. “Now, in order not to limit this evolution,” he states, “we need to invest in more technology, including RFID. So for more than two years, we have been planning the transformation of our business with iTAG, our RFID partner.” The implementation of the physical structure began in December 2020, and NTK started to integrate the iTAG system with its enterprise resource planning system in March 2021.
NTK Confecções began having tags placed on its kits this past May. “The kits are assembled to optimize costs,” Leite says, “so each kit with six pieces has a tag.” Not all areas of the company already use RFID, as some still have processes that are being adapted to implement the technology. RFID, he explains, is helping to make these processes more secure. “In May, we started making RFID widely available. In an entry operation, with 1,000 pieces, it took one hour to complete the entire counting and release process before RFID. Today, we spend less than 10 minutes to put products on sale. We will gradually streamline this process even more.”
The fashion brand company works with collections, and its management decided to begin with RFID technology for the spring-summer and fall-winter fashion seasons. “RFID brought security to information,” Leite reports. “That way, we can be sure that the right product is routed right for every customer order. In every sector, errors dropped to zero with RFID.”
The next steps include managing goods through product invoicing. Leite calculates that at present, 50 percent of the company is presently using RFID. “We still don’t use it in storage and distribution to warehouses, where we produce 45,000 pieces a day,” he notes. “I believe we will be able to put RFID in 80 percent of our operations by the end of 2021. The biggest challenge to implement the technology was to study processes that had to be revised, and all were greatly reduced.” Leite praises iTAG, stating, “The ease of implementing the iTAG system has been one of the benefits of this transformation, since iTAG has a very efficient team.”