While the Retail industry is poised to become one of the early adopters of the RFID technology, there is widespread anticipation and angst over the opportunities and changes this will bring about.
The immense potential that this technology offers to improve performance and therefore, business results is fairly apparent. Benefits in the areas of inventory management, product life tracking, shrinkage control and automated check-out are highly touted as reasons to embrace this technology.
Xpaseo's leadership in this new technology adoption is demonstrated by its ability to define a new solutions domain beyond the obvious ones. These focused solutions leverage the real-time and granular data enabled by RFID technology.
Examples of the Xpaseo solutions in the retail space include shrinkage control, shelf life management, space management & layout planning, promotion & markdown planning and multi-site merchandise leveling.
As an example, in a retail store it is fairly common for consumers to pick up an article from an aisle with an intention of buying it. As the person progresses through the store and reaches other sections they may end up dropping off the article at a different location. Due to the logistics involved in tracking and re-binning these items the activity of cleaning up is mostly attempted after customer hours. The implication of this is that there is a temporary shrinkage in inventory, which may lead to lost sales opportunity and customer dissatisfaction.
The Xpaseo solution with the real-time reads from the RFID network, monitors the travel paths of such items and provides a summary report of items that have been abandoned away from their storage locations on an hourly basis. This then enables the store personnel to make a re-binning walkthrough enabled by mobile readers to track and relocate these items.
We believe that innovation and market demands will bring about many more new and interesting solutions. The Xpaseo retail module framework is designed to be extendable and configurable to accommodate those needs.
