Displaying items by tag: RFID

GUEST RESEARCH: While the concept of seamless integration between online and offline shopping experiences is widely acknowledged among retailers in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), a study by Manhattan Associates identifies a significant gap between the ambition for seamless integration between online and offline shopping experiences and actual practice.

COMPANY NEWS: Towards the end of last year, RAMP RFID joined hands and partnered with Thread Together, a national Aussie charity that takes excess brand-new clothing donations and redistributes it to people in need. It’s a great initiative that helps thousands of people across Australia, but sometimes even those who are in the business of helping others need a bit of a helping hand themselves!

Thread Together not only had a massive amount of inventory on hand in their warehouses and fulfilment centres, but also a steady stream of incoming donations that needed to be processed, sorted, and stored. I’m glad that we were able to provide such a useful partnership and offer Thread Together, RAMP’s RFID technology, to help them manage their clothing donations. Every week, Thread Together helps over 2,500 people in vulnerable and marginalised families and communities across the country. An efficient and effective inventory management system is an absolute must to be able to coordinate across all their centres so that they can help as many people as possible.

The charity receives product donations from all over Australia from fashion brands that include Calvin Klein, RM Williams, UNIQLO, Under Armour and Lululemon. And while the generosity of these companies is gratefully accepted for redistribution to those in need, it did mean that Thread Together was faced with the mammoth task of sorting through all this brand-new clothing into product categories and sizes by an army of volunteers.

What they needed was a way to sort things quickly and easily so that items could be organised functionally for ease of access. To give you an idea of the scale of operation, since Thread Together began collecting end of line new stock from fashion retailers around Australia, it has helped redistribute more than 5.5 million items to those in need—and this is not even mentioning the benefit of redirecting 5.5 million items from ending up being dumped in landfill.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the charity is the supply-led nature in which they operate compounded further by the seasonal lag of product donations. So, it could be that in the middle of summer, Thread Together would be receiving unsold winter clothes from fashion brands. They then had to sort through and manage the inventory and storage of these items until the right season came along and the items were in need.

To be able to fulfil requests for clothing in a timely manner requires the charity to have accurate knowledge of inventory on hand, size of buffer stock and knowledge where supply exceeds the current and forecast demand profile.

In the past, lack of systems often resulted in situations where Thread Together didn’t have enough of what was needed and ended up having too much of what wasn’t in need. In addition, they often knew that they had particular products in stock, but didn’t have the capability to easily locate them.

This is where RAMP RFID came in.

RFID systems uses radio frequency technology to help retailers and other types of businesses to manage inventory at the press of a button. RAMP’s understanding of the technology and the solution we provided enabled the team at Thread Together to tag new clothing immediately as the donations were received and sorted into categories and sizes. By being able to do this, with ease, they are now able to rapidly determine the amount of inventory on hand; and of equal importance, understand where the items are located.

RAMP’s retail solution can locate where items are at any given time and has been a real game changer for Thread Together helping them to overcome their inventory management problems.

It was a simple yet effective and extremely efficient system to deploy. As with any change, a period of transition needed to occur, but these changeovers happen in a matter of days because the system is easy to master and easy to implement and roll out. All we needed to do was show them how to use RFID tags, RFID readers and RAMP’s own purpose-built, cloud-based RFID solution, Loca.fi retail software to scan, count and track stock on in their warehouse and fulfilment centres.

Using our RFID retail solution, they can now locate where items are at any given time, increasing efficiency and overcoming inventory management problems. The new system also helped them to reduce the time to fulfil requests for clothing by being able to more efficiently and effectively replenish their fulfilment centre.

Once their inventory management system was running smoothly and efficiently, they could go back to doing what matters most to them: providing new clothes to individuals, families and communities doing it tough.

Circumstances and disadvantage should not prevent people from the dignity of accessing clothing. Aside from the humanitarian perspective, this program is also better for the environment by redirecting items that would have ended up in landfill. Wastage is one of earth’s greatest problems, so this has been one very useful solution in our global attempt to be kinder to our planet.

Peter Reinke is the CEO of RAMP RFID.

COMPANY NEWS: Today, Manhattan Associates unveiled its vision for an RFID-powered store. Manhattan Active Omni suite has expanded its support of RFID tags for automating and streamlining the inventory counting, receiving, picking, checkout, return and exchange processes.

GUEST CASE STUDY: Zebra Technologies Corporation, an innovator at the front line of business with solutions and partners that deliver a performance edge, announced that BE Switchcraft has adopted Zebra’s radio frequency identification (RFID) solution to gain real-time visibility of its manufacturing process and financial data to help better fulfil its customers’ expectations.

Zebra's A/NZ director, Tom Christodoulou, and Daniel Park, Sales Engineer Manager, reveal in an exclusive video interview, what customers want in a post-COVID world, leading to retailers quickly adapting to an on-demand reality augmented by enterprise-grade technology delivering connectivity, productivity and customer satisfaction as never before.

Zebra's A/NZ director, Tom Christodoulou, and Daniel Park, Sales Engineer Manager, reveal in an exclusive video interview, what customers want in a post-COVID world, leading to retailers quickly adapting to an on-demand reality augmented by enterprise-grade technology delivering connectivity, productivity and customer satisfaction as never before.

Zebra Technologies recently released its new study entitled "Closing the Trust Gap: Technology and the Food Supply Chain", and we spoke to Zebra's Country Lead for A/NZ, Tom Christodolou, about technology's importance to the supply chain and how consumer trust can be restored and maintained in the food supply we all take for granted.

Date: 2nd September, Wednesday
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM (AEST)

Proudly celebrating 50 years of "innovating at the edge", two top Zebra executives talk to iTWire about the last five decades of success, the company's new hardware, how it all fits into Industry 4.0, customer success stories in Australia and plenty more.

The RFID market has plenty of room to grow over the next decade, with less than 20% penetration of the total addressable market for apparel alone in 2017, let alone everything else RFID is being used for.

Armourcell uses NFC energy to deliver NFC jamming technology to protect data, complementing Armourcard, the first and only battery-powered RFID jamming card that creates a force field of protection for credit card, debit cards and passports.

Retailers looking to capitalise on the Internet of Things (IoT) will spend an estimated $2.5 billion on hardware and installation costs over the next five years, according to newly published research.

Can passive RFID protection wallets that encase your credit cards with metal truly protect your cards from RFID skimming, or is active jamming a better solution?

Allied Telesis and Panasonic have joined forces to deliver ICT infrastructure to one of stadiums which has been built for the World Cup in Brazil.

Ever heard of a travel bag with built-in RFID chip and GPS technology? Me neither.

NFC Wireless established to distribute NFC tags, readers and software to local developers, as well as the corporate and government sectors throughout Australia. NFC Wireless are locally based distributors for UPM RFID NFC tags and ALK Technologies contactless NFC readers. The business provides encoding, printing and NFC related software development services.

Public transport users in cities throughout the Asia Pacific region are big users of smart cards - or radio frequency contactless cards - and now lead the world in using the cards to pay for their travel.

HID Global, trusted leader in solutions for the delivery of secure identity, today announced its RFID technology has been deployed as part of Relegen's asset intelligence solution assetDNAâ„¢ at the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service. The solution has been adopted by the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service as their Arms Inventory Management System to help them achieve real-time tracking of their extensive armory.

The federal government has deployed RFID technology from secure identity solutions vendor, HID Global, at the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service to help the service achieve real-time tracking of its extensive armoury.

How to combine print & mobile technology to engage consumers