- A handful of global retailers are tracking their inventory with hands-free solution and report a five percent sales lift
- On shelf availability in stores is preventing missed sales
Global retailers have begun tracking their inventory in near-real time with a passive UHF RAIN RFID solution known as TrackMaster 2X from PervasID.
Since being launched during RFID Journal LIVE! in 2024 TrackMaster 2X, several retailers around the world have begun using or piloting the technology and mounting it in their store ceilings, said PervasID’s founder and president Sabesan Sithamparanathan OBE.
Worldwide Coverage
TrackMaster 2X was built to be a lower cost alternative to PervasID’s overhead, highly-precise, near-real time detection systems for passive UHF RFID by providing zone-based locations. By identifying the location of tagged items within zones, with near 100 percent tag read accuracy, it can reduce the time for retailers’ return on investment (ROI) to less than 12 months.
Some of the retailers now have the technology deployed in hundreds of stores across North America, Europe and Asia, said Sithamparanathan.
Retail Use Cases
The retailers are tracking all merchandise in their stores with the exception of specific pieces of jewelry and beauty products that are difficult to apply tags to. Some of the retailers are now starting to apply specialty manufactured tags to these small items as well.
Sithamparanathan said the number one-use case is to address replenishment [restocking] on the sales floor. That means providing a view of what SKUs are available on the sales floor, and when their numbers are too low. The system sends an alert for the staff to replenish or restock during the day, which enables employees to restock the products in a short period of time.
“Therefore they can determine what item, specific color, and size, which is present and available in the stockroom but are missing from the sales area,” he said. “They don’t just wait for the end of the day, or the end of the operational day, to replenish.”
“The logic might say hey, you could have one item, one specific color or size which is present in the stockroom but missing from the sales area, and therefore go and replenish these particular items immediately.”
Click and Collect
The second application is to enable omnichannel sales based on online purchasing. The accurate inventory data in each store provides a view into whether products are available in the buyer’s geographic area.
“Retailers are really focusing on any benefit from this second use case,” Sithamparanathan said. “They are currently using it as a tool across global stores for click and collect.”
Staff members at the store in which the inventory was located can view their picking and packing assignment, along with the general location in which the product can be found. Sales staff are able to accept that order and locate the product rapidly and get it ready for packing and shipping.
Typical Deployment
The technology can cover a 10,000-square-foot building with four readers on the sales floor to create zones, and one in the backroom. That means the total cost of ownership of overhead, hands-free RFID is lower than traditional system due to less hardware installation.
Sithamparanathan said with a reported average of five percent sales uplift in the stores now using this technology, retailers could see a return on their investment in less than a year. “That’s what has driven them to roll this out globally,” he said.
From remote locations, retailers’ management can keep track of the precise volume of inventory in each store, virtually. Sithamparanathan counted the deployments across all the retailer customers in the “hundreds of stores.”
For sales associates, third party apps display the PervasID data on Android-based phones or iOS iPhones. “Whatever the device is, they will get this alert which tell them what to replenish, what to restock what color, what size, and where, in which location immediately,” Sithamparanathan said.
Better Shopping Experience
If a shopper comes into the store looking for a specific product, “whether that’s done in person or over the phone or online,” he said, the product might not be stocked where it is displayed. “They’re able to see in the app precisely where in the store—in what zone—so it might say it’s in a fitting room zone. Sales staff can quickly locate it without any handheld reader,” he stated.
Many of the retailers using the new TrackMaster 2X reader already used RFID handheld readers to locate their inventory. In their case, he said their inventory accuracy will rise from 95 percent to 99-plus percent, because of the hands-free data as it does not require employees “to walk around with a handheld, either weekly or bi-weekly or daily, saving hundreds of man-hours.”
Those who were not using handheld readers had an inventory accuracy of about 60 to 70 percent. He added, they will see a more dramatic return on investment.
The retailers that have deployed the system across its hundreds of stores “has seen a five percent overall increase in sales,” said Sithamparanathan.
Challenges of Densely Packed, Highly Metallic Stores
The new reader can accomplish its ultra-high read accuracy at low cost due to what Sithamparanathan calls its ground-breaking advanced signal processing techniques.
Previously, overhead readers didn’t offer a solution that was capable of achieving the high level of accuracy but when PervasID’s technology is deployed in stores where items are very dense on a mental shelf, getting 98 to 99 percent stock accuracy is not straightforward. “Many vendors have failed to achieve that in this scenario,” he said
To get high accuracy with conventional overhead readers the installation requires too many units and that becomes too costly, said Sithamparanathan. “It was simply too expensive to even install the solution – not just because of the hardware cost but also the installation. They need at least three to five times more readers and the Ethernet connection to each of these locations makes the total cost of the ownership expensive.”
That’s why it’s “so significant” the company can offer accuracy of 99-plus even in the densely packed stockroom with less hardware. A typical installation in a 10,000 square foot store could use one reader in the backroom and four on the sales floor to delineate zones.
Analytics from the Data
The solution uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect meaningful patterns.
If a tagged item was detected in the fitting room and was not sold, the system can identify if a product does not fit properly. The software will analyze that customer’s browsing data what’s been tried on and never sold. For loss prevention, the system alerts staff if an item is not in the store and where it was last seen before it went missing.
“Is that item being last seen in the fitting room where the customer stealing the item by tearing that RFID tag or is the item being stolen at the in the backroom removed by staff members,” explained Sithamparanathan. “They’re getting some analytics out of this system — it’s not intended to be like a real time alert your product is walking out the front door right now. In due course you could make it work for real time alerts too.”
Currently, retailers are using the technology to better understand where the shrink is happening is it in the fitting room is a specific zone in order to come up with the right strategy reduce the shrink rate—such as deploying more cameras or add more security guards.
AI for Money Mapping
Additionally, retailers are very keen on “money mapping” as the next sort of data analytics to review where potential sales are happening and when they might be missed.
“They want to understand sales by location so if they move a certain display to a different area, the sales rate goes up and so all these customers who now understand that real time on scalability if the data,” said Sithamparanathan. “Retailers want to know how they can increase revenue by optimizing by location, displaying the item at the right time for the right season or even on a daily basis or weekly basis so that you’re really optimizing the sales floor mapping.”
Sithamparanathan added that “we are calling that money mapping which is another piece of data analytics all these retailers are very keen for. Related to analytics the data is already there so it’s now all about you know mapping and understanding the sales rate by location.”
A single reader that could cover 2,600 square feet would significantly reduce the number readers that would be necessary, according to Sithamparanathan
“TrackMaster 2X is setting a new standard for near real-time, hands-free tracking for the retailer with a zone of accuracy and that leads into the future of retail—this is the future our technology is delivering,” he said.