Key Considerations for RFID Pilots and Deployments

Over the past several years, Auburn has worked with many retailers (large and small) on their RFID pilots and early-stage deployments. Every pilot and deployment is different and presents its own opportunities and challenges. However, across all of these projects, we have recognized some common errors and pitfalls that retailers face. Accordingly, we have distilled these errors and pitfalls into a list of 10 deployment rules.

1. It all starts with inventory accuracy. Companies use flawed methods of collecting data within their own inventories, and do not have a solid way to verify their own accuracy metrics. RFID is a trustworthy and consistent method to track inventory, granting visibility in the supply chain at a far greater level, so it should be used to tackle inventory accuracy problems first.
2. Decide what is important to you (beyond inventory accuracy). Whatever your purpose for deploying RFID, there should be a set of key metrics created to be referenced while deciding the scope and scale of deployment.
3. Involve all key stakeholders early on (depending on use cases). RFID will make a difference across various silos in the company which deploys it, so influential individuals and project teams should be kept in the loop.
4. Don’t spend time trying to answer the question, “Does the technology work?” The technology has been proven to work through research and early adopters. Instead, effort should be made towards figuring out specific business use cases.
5. Choose your pilot strategy. Pilot strategies and their scale should be chosen carefully, as the results from the pilot will color expectations of the performance of the technology.
6. Use Cases should drive technology, NOT vice versa. This seems like common sense, but companies will often forget this fact. Before choosing a technology to use, the use case for it should be clear.
7. Who will tag What, When, and How? Ultimately, for RFID to be cost effective, tagging must occur at (or very near) the source (point of manufacture). For pilots, while tagging at source is ideal, it is possible to tag at the retailer or supplier DC or at the store.
8. Use the Big Bang approach for initial tagging. For initial tagging, tag everything (i.e., within the scope of the pilot) at one time.
9. Running the pilot. Always use controls stores. Control stores are stores that are similar in size, sales, and geographic region to the test stores involved in the pilot.
10. Perform audits during the pilot. First, perform audits of the store execution. Are cycle counts being performed completely and on time? Are products being retagged properly (i.e., from returns, lost tags, etc.)? Second, audit the read rates. What are the effective read rates? Finally, audit for anomalies.