Hello, everyone. And welcome to another episode of Herb's Hot Takes. I'm Tyler Kern. Joined as always by the man himself. It's mister Billing. Herb. Welcome to another episode of the show. Thanks, Tyler. Glad to be here. I'm excited to have you along here today, Herb, because today we are finishing the fifth episode in our five part series on RFID. We've talked a lot about all the different things that RFID can do within reach settings, and today we are talking deployment. But before we do that, Herb, bring us up to speed on what we've done in the first four episodes of the show. Wow. It's a memory exercise. Let's see how that goes. A lot of ground to cover, man. Well, we talked a little bit about the history of RFID. It's not a new technology, but it is an citing technology and it's becoming much more affordable for retailers to implement and get a successful ROI out of. We also talked about the supply chain and how RFID can apply in the supply chain. One of the big topics is the primary use cases that prompts retailers to implement our FID, and inventory record accuracy is chief among them, also display compliance, making sure you have one of everything on the sales floor. In our last episode, we talked about all the cool uses that RFID can also give a retailer to improve the shoppers' experience. Certainly, it helps eliminate out of stock conditions, which is a really big topic for retailers, and a really big thing for shoppers, but also the smart fitting rooms, with the smart mirrors in them, can speed up the shopping process so can the checkout experience? A lot of lot of ground that we've covered so far. And yeah, some great stuff to go. So as we talk today about deployment, talk to me a little bit about the decision making process. How does someone determine if RFID is a right decision for them. Well, that that's a good point. You know, it's it's one thing to talk about cool new technology and it's quite another to actually implement it, especially in big retailers. We know that that's a very big change for them. The very first thing you need to do is determine if this is the right thing for you. Metals liquids, these still pose a challenge for RFID tags. There are options. You can have specialized tags which work around some of the physics challenges on metals and liquids, but they cost more, and they might be some thing that you need to consider because they they may look different and not be appealing for your merchandising strategy. Certainly, if if it's right for you, like we were talking about, you would have a use case that justifies your ROI, typically inventory record accuracy or display compliance. This is all around inventory tracking. Another broad category would be store operations, and this is less implemented, but growing in implementation, checkout experience, maybe self checkout, Certainly auto replenishment from back to front, these types of use cases are coming online. And then the customer experience. I know we about that a lot in the last episode with the smart mirrors and the recommendations and improving the amount of and increasing the amount of money that the shopper spends at the retailer's location. These are awesome. They are also in the very early stages of deployment around retailers. But one of these will provide the ROI you need, and it's important to determine if RFID is right for you. Yeah. That's a really good point. And you brought up ROI. So let's talk a little bit about ROI. How does maybe how would you recommend a retailer considering and thinking through What would my return on investment be for this particular technology? Yeah. That's a that's a really good question. And one that we're able to help with. Mhmm. Obviously, the retailers know their business, but some of these benefits can be hard quantify. Yes. To start with the RFID tag cost, now it's somewhere between four and eight cents, per tag depending on the options, the size of the tag, the color scheme, all of that. Mhmm. Where to tag is an important consideration. The further up the supply chain you tag, the cheaper and more efficient your tagging is. If you tag closer to the store, or in the store itself, that's the most inefficient and expensive place to do it. We've seen an implementation where the store absolutely wanted everything RF detected and has to have a tagging operation for those items that come in that aren't. It's possible, but expense You have to consider hardware and the maintenance of that hardware. So this is, you know, mobile device readers, POS devices that integrate into your current point of sale equipment. You also have fixed readers in some places, printers, and others, These items, you know, need to be installed, they need to be maintained. Ongoing software licenses need to be considered as well. You have definitely the cost per device, and this is something that retailers need to make sure that they consider? Probably the biggest thing that or the hardest thing, I should say, for retailers is the process change What you're doing around barcodes must change to implement RFID. A real simple example is receiving Many retailers will receive blindly, so they won't actually even audit the items coming into the store the system must be right. So give it three days for transportation and then update the store's records with the items we think are in that box. With RFID, you can actually audit one hundred percent of the boxes. And so that's a new process for those store to learn how to do, and how to do it differently with RFID than over bar codes. And then there's the system integration with your existing systems. Right. It's very helpful to do that. Now RFID can be implemented without integration but then you have a number of issues associated with that. A partial implementation means partial information On the plus side of things, and this is really the happy side, this definitely increases sales. There's an academic study of seven retailers a million SKUs in a hundred store locations. That shows counting more often can increase sales between four and eight percent for the time frames that were not previously covered by new counts. This is a big number. And in the bar code world, you're counting everything only once or twice a year. In the RFID world, you can do it every week. So your sales can increase. Your reject rates in your omnichannel world, we hear a lot of pain and suffering in the retailers around reject rates for buy online pickup in store and ship from store orders. We know one retailer would send three separate people out when the first one could not find the item. That's a lot of wasted labor. And of course, when you have to reject an order, you are disappointing a customer, and you don't get many opportunities to do that before you lose their lifetime value. That's true. And then, of course, there's the labor savings. So any amount of time that it takes to go find an item, any amount of time it takes to perform all of your inventory management tasks, those become much faster and easier with RFID? Yeah. That's a great point. And in doing that, are you then able to kind of make good use of real time data and improve efficiencies that way as well? Absolutely. That's the third thing that goes with a successful deployment is making sure you make use of that real time data. It's a wealth of information you can know when items move if you've implemented any kind of fixed readers, your accuracy of your inventory transaction goes way up. So you have a lot of information that you need to understand how you will study it and take action on what you aligned. So it seems like there's a lot to think about when it comes to planning an RFID project, but tell me how data scanning can partner along with retailers unable to to make this happen? Absolutely. With our partnership with sequential, we are able to help retailers along this path. We can help you determine if it's right. We can help you with your ROI calculations, integrate with key systems, and how to make use of the information once you have it implemented. We walk you through every step of the way with experience of our partnership, we're able to help retailers with their RFID journey. Yeah. That's a great point. And obviously, with many different things to think through having a partner like DataScan can make all the difference in the world. Herb, I think that does it. I think we've covered all five episodes on RFID. Any final thoughts, anything you will leave our viewers with here as we wrap up another series? Sure. We are very excited about this partnership with Forquincyal. We are looking forward to helping retailers with their RFID needs. And it was a lot of fun to do this. It culminates a two year dive into the RFID world and a lot of due diligence and in in that space. Well, we appreciate your expertise as always her billing. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Tyler. Absolutely. That does it For this series on RFID here on Herb's hot takes, we appreciate it very much. Of course, for more information to read Herb's blog, you can always go to datascan dot com for more to stay up to date with the latest from them and of course, stay tuned to the keeping count channel where we post more episodes. Frequently not just Herb takes but lots of other content there well. So you wanna make sure to subscribe to that to stay up to date with with the latest from DataScan, and stay tuned. We'll be back soon with more episodes of Herb dot takes well as keeping count, but for this one, for her billings, I'm Tyler Kerr. We'll talk to you again soon.
