Tech Guest Viewpoint:
Steps to Implementing RFID Successfully
 

By Steve Sell
Chief Marketing Officer, USS

Careful planning with clear, set goals will better your chances to get the most out of any vision. When considering RFID in retail, it's no different. If you start with the results you want and identify a pathway toward achieving them, you'll set yourself up for success.

Perhaps you want enhanced visibility of merchandise, or sharper in-store process efficiency. Maybe you feel harnessing real-time information will help lead to better decisions. RFID can help you achieve all of these. The right goals for your business have the potential to increase your profit and bottom line success. Whatever your goal, pick one and focus on it.

Once you have a goal and expected outcome in mind, it's time to prepare. First, consider the size of your organization. True discovery, testing and implementation of an RFID program could take as little as six months to well more than five years. Expected outcomes and the number of use cases you need will impact your timeline, because the scope of work drives the systems needed for integration. This is highly critical, as time and money invested in RFID are what turn it into a quality outcome.

The following steps will help achieve the right RFID results:

1. Understand the goals: Partner, really partner, with your integrator to understand the business model and technical maturity of your systems currently in place. In order to do so, a complete step-by-step walkthrough of your perfect RFID outcome is key. This helps support the largest ROI.

2. Ensure supply chain collaboration: Your ROI velocity is dependent upon everyone the RFID implementation will effect getting behind the technology. In addition to your departmental stakeholders understanding the uses of an RFID system, a strong collaboration between suppliers and other internal stakeholders is crucial to realizing the greatest value in RFID.

3. Define outcomes clearly: Defining project objectives and agreeing to an order of implementation steps will help manage expectations and avoid complications. The steps toward achieving full discovery are as follows: audit current systems for integration purposes, identify third-party stakeholders and offset potential obstacles.

4. Project scoping: How wide is the scope? How narrow? Make sure your integration partner sources both hardware and software solutions, details the primary location and timelines for implementation and identifies both local and corporate project participants. Maintaining documents that outline equipment and software requirements, as well as regulatory and environmental factors, will help keep the implementation process on track.

5. Primary development and staging: RFID implementation takes a strong attention to detail. An important part of the process is when the integrator and retailer develop integration bridges, make sure to stage the test environment, walk through the proof of concept and debug the system. In short, many tasks are necessary to be able to adapt and easily make any changes that should occur before implementation.

6. Implementation/test installation: Depending on the size of your implementation, "shadow runs" can be performed to train stakeholders. Shadow runs are done in off hours, so they do not impact normal store operations.

You and your team can get RFID right the first time by first defining what you want out of RFID, and then moving in a methodical process toward adoption across the enterprise. Each individual company and the retail industry at large have much to gain by adopting RFID and reaping the benefits it has to offer.