Retail Issues - RFID and Electronic Product Coding
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So far retailers have been keener on RFID than manufacturers, which is not surprising seeing as they see the bulk of the benefit of RFID. But with retailers now rolling out mandates to their suppliers - Electronic Product Coding (RFID) WILL be implemented - at least at Pallet and Transit level.
Major retailers are leading the transformation from highly manual, focused retail distribution centres – towards more automated, composite facilities. This transformation, (reminiscent of the manufacturing automation revolution of the 70s and 80s) is driven by the extreme sensitivity of retailers to end-to-end handling costs. Combining produce, chilled and ambient distribution in one large scale automated facility drives down handling costs significantly – though implementing such a vision is not without its pains.
The Automated Sortation facilities currently being installed suffer 5% bar-code read failures on cases. That's 25,000 failures a day in a typical unit. Content checking mixed pallets (when pallet ID reads fail) requires de-stacking where volumes and space do not permit it.
RFID allows a more automated approach to tracking pallets - as line of sight is no longer required to access the data content of the tag. Hence RFID is a key step in the progression towards automated distribution centres.
The extra data storage of RFID also presents an opportunity for increased food traceability in the supply chain - with a jittery public ever more worried over food safety alerts, managing and containing scares as quickly and competently as possible is a must for the industry.
With RFID as a given - manufacturers may as well take advantage of it in their own operations. Obviously stock tracking and load checking should be used. Possible other opportunities arise from personnel performance monitoring in picking operations to auto sortation - on the back of an investment which must be made in any case.
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