When Florida retailer City Furniture encountered a series of disappointments with its RFID deployment in 2020, followed by the COVID-19 shutdowns, the Fort Lauderdale-based company could have abandoned its technology efforts. Instead, it chose to use the closure to work with a new vendor, identify the key technology problems and resolve them with an RFID system that would provide visibility into its inventory.
As a result, City Furniture has reopened with RFID functionality at all 33 of its store showrooms, with plans to expand the technology’s use to distribution centers, and to begin source-tagging and installing reader portals at each retail site. The system, provided by RFID4U and known as TagMatiks AT, has enabled the company to address the previous cost of lost inventory, says Sanjiv Dua, RFID4U’s CEO, and to gain weekly stock updates at each showroom.
Inventory counts at each site have been reduced from several weeks down to only a few hours, according to Ricardo Perdigao, City Furniture’s managing director and enterprise technology architect. Founded in 1971, the company has 33 showrooms with two large distribution centers, and each showroom contains 15,000 to 17,000 pieces. “We’ve been growing tremendously,” Perdigao says. “We’ve been in hypergrowth mode,” with more stores opening in the Orlando area and Tampa, and with plans to reach into Georgia in the coming years.
To capture inventory numbers, store associates had to physically count everything several times annually using 2D barcode scans. “We set up a crew and count every single item in every showroom over five or six days,” Perdigao says. The firm wanted inventory counts conducted more frequently, and to better serve its customers shopping online and seeing or buying items in store. During the pandemic, he says, inventory accuracy for such buyer behavior has been more important than ever.
The company chose a technology provider, then began to implement the system at all of its showrooms. One of its aims was to address inventory loss. Thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise was often found to be missing during annual manual inventory counts. Some of those goods may have been located in a different showroom, Perdigao explains, or they may have been sold without being accounted for, but others were lost entirely. “We didn’t have visibility,” he states. “Even if the product was physically there, we didn’t always know it was there.”
After City Furniture acquired its first RFID solution in 2019, it experienced multiple challenges with the hardware and software it deployed at each showroom. For one thing, the software would crash due to the high volumes of read data, while the printing of labels often failed. Additionally, Perdigao says, tags were often difficult to read since they were large and didn’t operate well on all pieces of furniture, especially those made with metal. “The adoption was very painful for us because we didn’t pick the right partner with the right experience,” he recalls. “That cost us dearly.”
Rather than abandoning its RFID efforts, City Furniture sought another partner. Once the COVID-19 outbreak began, business shut down last spring. “We were talking to Sanjiv [Dua],” Perdigao recalls, “and said ‘Let’s go ahead and implement this solution and migrate from the old partner to this new partnership.'” That took place from April until the end of August, which included deploying the TagMatiks solution and accomplishing the necessary integrations and customizing.
One of the first steps was to identify better tags. To that end, the firm selected Avery Dennison Smartrac‘s passive UHF RFID Midas Flag tag, which operates with a variety of materials. The company employs Convergence Systems Ltd. (CSL)’s CS108 Sled handheld readers, using docking stations for recharging. Previously, the solution had required USB cables for the charging of readers, which led to breakage. With the use of docking stations, the company reports, the incidents of breakage have stopped.
What’s more, the company’s previous use of Zebra ZT410 and ZT411 RFID printers also led to problems, as the tags had to be perfectly aligned in order to print properly. As a result, errors were made that could impact all tags within an entire showroom. So with RFID4U, City Furniture implemented processes that included setting up rules to ensure users recalibrate and test printers before each print process. Finally, the TagMatiks AT cloud-based software was integrated with the company’s own management software.
When the project to rework City Furniture’s RFID system was launched, Dua recalls, “We [RFID4U] saw multiple problems. All problems were solvable, though. RFID is a physics and an IT integration process journey. Everything was step by step.” The furniture store now applies a Flag tag to each item as goods are received. Each tag ID number is linked to a particular product’s details in the TagMatiks software, and the product is displayed in the showroom. As an item is sold, its tag is removed and the inventory data is updated.
Weekly—usually on Mondays—staff members walk through the showroom with the CSL handheld readers and capture inventory data within about two hours. The inventory data is then updated in the TagMatiks software and shared with the company’s own inventory-management system. If an item is found to be missing or to have been misplaced, workers can seek to resolve the problem in real time. That, Perdigao says, saves considerable time when compared against manual efforts.
During the next phase, the company hopes to install fixed UHF RFID reader gates in its back receiving area, which would read product tags as goods are brought into the store. The system could then match the showroom inventory data against information related to goods received. The firm plans to begin a proof-of-concept of such readers later this year, and to equip its warehouses with RFID readers and work with its vendors to have them apply RFID tags before shipping goods. “The idea,” Perdigao says, “is when the product leaves the source, the tag is already there. That’s the future of our projects.”
In addition to saving labor time, the accurate inventory data in each showroom helps to improve customer care and thereby lift sales. The technology has also identified where breakdowns occurred in the inventory-management process. For example, Perdigao says, “We had limited visibility before we started using the system” about events such as products sold without being properly released from inventory, as well as goods being misplaced that should have been marked as damaged.
In addition, each RFID label comes with a printed QR code that can be scanned via a smartphone to open the City Furniture website and provide product information, says Archit Dua, RFID4U’s director of strategic development. “It’s part of the continuous movement toward digital connection,” he states. Sales associates can scan a tag to view dedicated information for in-house inventory purposes.
Throughout the deployment, Sanjiv Dua says, “City Furniture took a leadership role in solving their challenges. Using RFID on furniture is a no-brainer,” and high-value items can be difficult to track manually. “The problem is, where is my inventory and how can I keep track of what I have in my stock? This is even more critical now,” he adds, as customers place online orders. “It was clear, from the top level, they had roadblocks [with challenges using the solution from the first provider] but they resolved the problem.”
“They engaged us, explained the problem clearly, and that is 50 percent of the solution,” Dua states. “Once you know what the problem is, you can get to the root of it and solve it.” Additionally, he says, much of the work in this case was done remotely due to the pandemic lockdowns. “I think the key part was the management decision to stick with the technology and make it work.”