RFID Lab Tests Item Tags
Last updated Friday, May 25, 2007 5:31 PM CDT in Business
By Anita French
The Morning News
It's happened to many female shoppers, and maybe even some men. They find a pair of shoes they like in the store, but it's not their size.
Never fear. RFID is here.
Soon a clerk shows up with a scanner and, using radio frequency identification, finds the right shoe size for the customer.
This scenario is similar to one imagined by Professor Bill Hardgrave of the University of Arkansas' RFID Research Center in Fayetteville.
But his vision goes even further into the realm of imagination.
"Imagine shopping without money, sales clerks or even cash registers. All you have to do is walk in, find your items and walk out. In the not-so-distant future, special technology within retail stores may help you find items you want, recognize these items when you leave without stopping to check out, and charge your bank account automatically," he said in a recent news release.
Hardgrave admits this all sounds "utopian," but he and his research team are collaborating with a major retail industry organization and a global supply chain association to explore the possibility of using RFID tags for item-level tagging of apparel and footwear.
If successful, Hardgrave sees a future in which shoppers wouldn't have to wait in line for items to be rung up at a register, while at the same time reducing inventory time and costs for retailers.
"With RFID, you can take inventory much faster and be more accurate than you can with a bar code," he said in an interview with The Morning News. "What we expect to see is, instead of taking all day to inventory a store, it will take an hour or more and with better accuracy. And one of the banes of the apparel industry is you have a shopper come in and find an item they like but can't find their size. With RFID, the technology offers an opportunity to find the product with a hand-held scanner."
RFID uses a decoder, a radio frequency tag and an antenna that emits radio signals to activate the tag and read and write data to it. The technology is expected to eventually replace the universal bar code.
Hardgrave's research team has already been collaborating with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in the use of RFID at the pallet and case level, and found that using the tags can reduce out-of-stock inventory by 30 percent.
Wal-Mart, which has led the way in the use of RFID among retailers, started using the technology several years ago in some of its stores and distribution centers. In May, the company said it would extend its radio frequency identification program to 400 stores by the end of its fiscal year.
Wal-Mart isn't part of the research this time in the use of RFID on apparel and footwear, Hardgrave said. Instead, the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals in Illinois is funding this new research and is partnering with the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions Association, a retail and consumer-goods industry organization that creates best practices to lower business costs and increase product availability for consumers.
Kathleen Hedland is director of education research with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. She said her organization's role in the research is not only funding but also to use its 9,000 world-wide membership as a resource for onsite testing of RFID applications.
"Their goal is to reduce the cost of putting products on the shelves and to the consumer," she said about suppliers. "They're constantly being asked to wring more cost out of the supply chain. Even though it's going to cost something to implement the RFID program, they're hoping to get the tags down to a level where they can afford to do so. Better control of the inventory is going to be beneficial to our members and our consumers."
Hardgrave said the new research will first consist of identifying what retailers call "use cases" or "payback areas," which are simply business processes upon which retailers expect item-level tagging to have the greatest impact. Researchers will then test those processes in a lab environment. The goal is to provide an objective evaluation of item-level tagging for apparel and footwear.
"Apparel and footwear present a pretty good test for RFID at the item level. They're RFID friendly because there is not a lot of metal and water associated with them, which makes the tags easier to read. And normally, these are higher-price ticket items. We're not talking about (using RFID) on every day items like cans of soup and loaves of bread," Hardgrave said.
Right now, RFID tags run between 5 and 10 cents each, according to industry spokesmen, who said the price needs to get lower to make them profitable. But Hedland said it was "questionable" if the cost of an RFID tag could ever get low enough to justify using them on low-price items like cans of soup.
Some consumer groups have raised concerns about the security aspects of RFID, especially after it was suggested the tags could eventually be used to track consumer-spending habits. Hardgrave said one of the underlying themes to all of the tests done at the UA's RFID lab is considering privacy and security applications.
"The good news is that, with the technology being what it is, the tags do not broadcast data until they get within vicinity of a reader. When they do, it's usually only information that is on the tag; there's no consumer information on that tag. On the surface, there are really no privacy and security issues with the system as it is right now. We don't want people to feel apprehensive about using this technology when it's on a piece of apparel or footwear," Hardgrave said.
He said initial phases of the research could be completed by the end of this year, and that it's reasonable to expect that retailers could be using RFID at the apparel level by late next year.
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