Aug 20, 2007This article was originally published by RFID Update.
August 20, 2007—RFID solutions provider TAGSYS today announced two deployments in the apparel and retailing space. The first is for Portuguese fashion house Throttleman, the second for jeans giant Levi Strauss. The deployments bode well for the growing adoption of Gen2 RFID for item-level tagging in the apparel and retail industries.
Throttleman processes 1.5 million items of clothing annually, which range in price from ten to 250 euros. Eager to speed up the distribution of its goods from factory to distribution center, the company turned to RFID as an enabler. The reported results are dramatic: clothing items now spend on average five days less time in the DC, and the company's restocking capabilities are faster and more accurate.
Items are tagged at the manufacturer, packaged into boxes, and shipped to the Throttleman distribution center. Upon arrival, the boxes pass through a TAGSYS RFID reader tunnel, which scans the tagged items contained within. Those contents are then automatically checked against the packing slip. In the event of a discrepancy between the two, an alert is triggered so that a worker can open the box and investigate the issue.
The RFID technology used is Gen2. The RFID labels are supplied by Paxar and the middleware by Sybase. Creativesystems, a local Portuguese systems integrator, worked with TAGSYS on the deployment.
Throttleman's associate general director Miguel Maya was quoted in the release, "Throttleman knew that in order to meet our sales goals we needed to speed up reception and distribution to a fraction of the time it previously took." TAGSYS president and CEO Elie Simon added, "RFID will enable Throttleman to generate more sales revenue thanks to better availability of the latest styles on shelves."
TAGSYS' deployment at Levi Strauss will see RFID readers installed across 40 stores throughout Mexico. Like Throttleman's, it is a Gen2 deployment, but the focus is on improving the checkout process. The TAGSYS readers employ a special antenna design that tightly localizes the read field to enable multiple stacked items to be scanned without also scanning nearby items.
Grupo Hasar acted as systems integrator on the job. The Argentinean company specializes in data collection and has offices and clients throughout Latin America.
Both the Throttleman and the Levi deployment point to the increasing preference for Gen2 RFID in item-level retail applications. Recall the industry debate as to whether UHF or HF is preferable at the item level. While the debate has mostly centered around pharmaceutical track-and-trace, it has at times spilled over into retail. Successful deployments like these clearly bolster the UHF position -- especially since they were implemented using solutions from TAGSYS, which had historically been a leading HF proponent but has more recently diversified into UHF.
