The Retail RFID Opportunity - Retail Stores are a natural environment to deploy RFID. Typically high employee turnover, ever changing product assortments, promotions and demanding consumers combine to make structured store operations a challenge for even the best retail operators. RFID, or more specifically the data provided by store level RFID implementations, can be used to improve store operations and enhance consumer experiences.

There are many opportunities for ROI in Retail:

• Inventory Management
  • Out-of-Stock Reductions
  • Rapid, Accurate Physical Inventories
  • Special Orders Management
  • Backroom & Overhead Storage Management
  • Shrink & Loss Prevention
• Merchandising Effectiveness
  • Plan-o-gram Verification
  • Promotions Management
  • Markdowns Management
• Enhanced Consumer Experience
  • Right Product at the Right Price at the Right Time
  • In-aisle Personalized Marketing
  • Self Service CRM
• Improved Operations
  • Streamlined Receiving
  • Returns Management
  • Lay-Away Processing

An Infrastructure for Retail RFID - The use of RFID in retail environments creates many requirements for an expandable, sustainable infrastructure. To gain the maximum value/ROI, implementers will make use of many RFID data consuming applications. Store level deployments will incorporate both fixed/portal type readers and handheld/mobile readers to facilitate tag data capture as part of many processes in many locations. There is value to be gained from both case level and item level tag tracking, but the data challenges associated with each impact solution scaling requirements. And, most retailers envision incremental use of RFID over time as they expand the number of tracking locations, deployed readers and consuming applications within each store. The Reva Systems Tag Acquisition Processor (TAP) delivers the scalable infrastructure platform that retailers can depend on to generate value now and in the future.

Using handheld readers, bench mark tags and Reva's TAP infrastructure physical inventories can be done in a fraction of the time it takes with traditional methods.

The Reva TAP supports most major reader brands and models with simple point-and-click configuration. The Reva solution provides a graphical user interface that allows implementers to define physical facility layouts, place fixed readers, indicate benchmark reference tags for coordinating and dynamically determining mobile reader locations, create business location representations and once deployed - remotely manage and monitor facility level RFID networks. Configuration tasks can also be automated to facilitate rapid rollouts for deployments that incorporate 100's of facilities.

Reva Systems is a proud member of the METRO Group Future Store Initiative. Click here for more information