Metro Group continues to move forward with its rollout and testing of RFID technology. At the end of November, the company plans to announce details of a pilot testing RFID at a distribution center for deep-frozen foods in Hamm, Germany.
The retailer is testing passive EPC RFID tags on pallets to automate the receipt and storage of goods, as well as track its inventory, said Christian Plenge, Metro’s head of research and innovation, at the RFID Journal LIVE! Europe conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday.
Plenge told attendees that Metro has placed RFID tags on 11,000 bins (storage locations for pallets) and installed interrogators on 15 forklifts at the frozen-food center, a 10,000-square-meter facility with temperatures as low as -24 degrees Celsius. The center will be outfitted with 75 antennas linked to a total of 30 RFID readers, and three RFID printer-encoders. The technology vendors taking part in the test were not disclosed at the conference.
“Readers heat themselves sufficiently within their housing,” Plenge said. “We know that we can read the positioning tags [on the bins] well. We don’t know how well we can read tags on the pallets. This is something we have to analyze.”
The frozen-foods facility receives roughly 135,000 tagged pallets each year. Pallets are tagged internally or come from more than 150 goods suppliers participating in the company’s tagging program. According to Plenge, Metro plans to increase this number to 400 for 2008.
At the pallet level, Metro has already made substantial progress with its RFID rollout. Internally, the retailer is tagging 100 percent of its own pallets that are delivered from one distribution center to all its Cash & Carry stores. Metro has now turned most of its testing efforts to case- and item-level tagging. “Pallet tagging is not our goal,” Plenge said.
Since July 2006, the company has been testing case-level tagging on pallets full of mixed cases. Tags are applied at one distribution center in Essen, Germany, and goods are tracked as they move to a specific store in Rheinberg. Plenge said Metro has achieved a 95 percent read rate there as well. The 5 percent of unread items, he explained, are comprised of products that interfere with RF signals, such as cans of dog food, plastic bottles of liquids or items that can detune a tag, such as jars of jam.
The company has gotten around this problem, Plenge told the audience, by adjusting the positioning of tags on the cases and persuading producers to adapt their products for RFID. For instance, Milka, a chocolate maker, changed its chocolate bars’ packaging from foil to plastic, alleviating the read-interference problem Metro had been experiencing.
Plenge said he expects Metro to be able to use case-level tagging in its operations in the third or fourth quarter of 2008. At the item level, the company recently embarked on a pilot testing tagged men’s clothes at a department store in Essen (see Metro Group’s Galeria Kaufhof Launches UHF Item-Level Pilot).