Below are three of the top stories in automated data collection, RFID and the Internet of Things in recent weeks.
Australian Department Store Chain Myer Hopes RFID will Save it from Its Woes
As with many of its US compatriots, Australian department store chain Myer has been struggling financially.
It's hoping RF ID technology will boost its top and bottom lines.
Myer's head of retail operations Gary Stones says RFIDP-based systems has already helped retailer boost sales and cut shrink in categories of its private label brands such as bed linens.
Myer started testing RFID tags in September 2017, applying the tags to consumer electronics sold in its flagship store in Melbourne.
Supply Chain Digest Says... |
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| The issue with RFID continues to be its cost and benefit in the supply chain versus the more ubiquitous bar code. |
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It is now using RFID in six stores in the city of Victoria and one in Sydney to locate and identify electronics, bed linen and apparel. It is also in negotiations with bed-linen company Sheridan and a major apparel label about source tagging merchandise in their factories and selling the products in all 61 Myer stores.
"We're also exploring opportunities to put RFID technology into Only at Myer and Myer exclusive brands (private label brands such as Basque and Blaq) where we control the whole supply chain," said Stones.
"They'd be installed at source in the factory - that way you can track that inventory through the entire supply chain to when it arrives in the customers' hands," Stones told The Australian Financial Review.
"We have to do proof of concept (but) as we control the supply chain, that would be a quick win for Myer to target private label while we work with national brand suppliers," he said.
The main benefits are in tracking inventory - ensuring the right amount of stock is in the right place at the right time to avoid missing out on sales in store and online - and reducing "shrinkage", including theft, in distribution centers and stores.
Myer estimates about 85% of shrinkage is due to staff or customer theft and 15% is due to administrative and supply-chain errors.
"You can perform stocktakes multiple times on any given day and update inventory instantly in real time," he said, "so the inventory in stores or on your website is 100% accurate," Stones added.
Sales had risen in categories where RFID is used as a result of improved on-shelf availability, and taking store inventories, which once took some 30 hours - had been cut to eight minutes, freeing staff to serve customers.
Myer also had reduced its shrink rate 80% in some categories by taking daily inventories, pinpointing where shrinkage or theft was occurring and taking measures to combat losses.
"If team members are dishonest, when they understand you can track individual items and you're going to know it's missing between morning and lunch time, that's an absolute deterrent to team member dishonesty,"Stones said.
Impinj with Mixed Financial Results
Leading RFID tag and reader maker Impinj continues to have its struggles financially and on Wall Street.
For instance, in its fourth-quarter earnings report, Impinj projected revenue of $30 million to $32 million in the first quarter. That represents more than 20% growth from 2018 levels, but it's actually slightly lower at the midpoint from its 2017 mark, indicating that Impinj is only recouping the shortfall from selling off its inventory backlog identified a year ago
Impinj is also still operating at a loss, though the company is nearly 20 years old, and that loss is expected to continue at least through the next two years. For the current quarter, Impinj projects an adjusted loss of $6.2 million to $4.7 million, or a loss of $0.29 to $0.22 per share.
"In other words, Impinj's current trajectory and its recent history of losses, as well as the temporary decline in revenue, don't bode well for the company's position 10 years from now," one analyst recently wrote, adding that "Those are all important factors to consider, but a better question for investors wondering about Impinj's status in a decade centers on the future of RFID."
The analyst cites sensors, camera, drone and other technologies that could supplant the use of RFID.
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SCDigest believes that is quite a stretch, and that the issue with RFID continues to be its cost and benefit in the supply chain versus the more ubiquitous bar code.
The analysis adds that "Similarly, Walmart has had disappointing results over the years with RFID. Back in 2003, the world's largest retailer asked its 100 biggest suppliers to begin using RFID tags; however, RFID never quite delivered the efficiencies that the retailer hoped for as it didn't always work well and proved to be expensive to tag every individual item. The data it provided was not always useful, either, and Walmart eventually suspended it."
That is partially accurate, but to say RFID did not deliver expected efficiencies is really not right, as Walmart's poor execution of the program meant it never really had the opportunities to discover or test the potential productivity and accuracy boosts.
Impinj's numbers for the latest quarter are shown below:
Denso with New RFID Sled for Smart Phones and More
Denso, a maker of various bar code scanning devices and inventor of the QR Code, has released a new RFID read "sled" that can enable smart phones to read RFID tags.
 The new SP1 RFID scanner, the company says, allows RFID reading to be added to almost any smart device. It has a scanning range of up to eight meters
Denso says the SP1 RFID sled can read up to 700 RFID tags per second, making it well suited for taking inventories in the retail sector or in warehousing.
To connect the devices to each other, a QR Code, which is printed on the SP1 RFID sled, is read with an available smart device. The smart device and the SP1 RFID sled are then paired via Bluetooth. Even if the Bluetooth connection is interrupted temporarily during a scanning process, no data gets lost as the SP1 RFID sled stores all scanned data internally. That way, the SP1 RFID sled is able to resynchronize with the application program, even if there was an interruption.
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