Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Herb's hot takes. I'm Tyler Kern. Enjoyed as always by herb Billings Herb. Welcome to another episode of the show. How you doing? I'm doing great today, Tyler. How are you? Hi. I'm doing well. I'm doing well excited to dive back in. To remember the topic in RFID, This is the third out of a five part episode series on RFID. And so today, we're talking about supply chain management and how RFID plays a role in that as well. And so herb again, this is a supply chain as a topic that has been discussed quite a bit in the retail community over the last couple of years, but before we dive into supply chain management, take us back to the last few episodes of of Herb takes and what we've talked about in RFID. We started off with the history. And then we talked about some of the primary drivers for RFID. Oh, yes. So the history, you know, it seems like it's a new technology, but really what's happening is it's becoming more affordable to support the internet of things, which we've all heard about. And so retailers are starting to implement it more and more as the ROI makes sense for them. But it's actually a technology that dates back to World War two. Also, the primary drivers for the retailers other than it's becoming more affordable, inventory record accuracy is key. For a successful omnichannel strategy. If you don't get that right, you have high reject rates, a lot of ways labor and of course unhappy customers, and unhappy customers doesn't really mix with retail. So yes, you know, a lot of lot of good stuff that we've covered in previous episodes. I I encourage everybody to go listen to them if they haven't already. Absolutely. Yeah. Go back and check out those other two episodes if you haven't up to this point. But today we're talking supply chain management. Now supply chain is really a topic and a a term maybe that has gone from maybe somewhat obscurity and like a niche topic to being something that's in the mainstream and that you hear quite a bit about the news these days. I know. Before two years ago, whoever heard of supply chain or cared what it was about and then toilet paper So now, you know, the supply chain is at the top of everybody's mind, and we see how fragile it can be. It's worked great for a number of years and that some marginal improvements have been made, but recently we've identified that there's big changes that need to happen. So what is the supply chain? Well, it covers every step from the manufacturer to the consumer. You know, from the manufacturing facility to the distribution centers, to the stores themselves, It includes everything in between all of the transportation and storage methods, temporary storage mess methods along the way, ships planes, trucks, warehouses, shipyards, all of that is part of the supply chain. There are a number of problems that can happen at any step of the way. One of them is, you know, you have a flaw in your reordering. You're either too late or you're too early. In the retail world, the reason for doing that is bad information about the inventory levels you have. That's that's typically a problem. One of the things that retailers do to avoid reordering too late or to handle inaccurate inventory records is to manage safety stock. That safety stock is not necessarily always in the stores. It can also be up the supply chain. It would have been great to have had triple or quadruple the amount of toilet paper available in all of the warehouses throughout the supply chain, but that's not possible because that costs a lot of money. So safety stock costs money. And then there's the not ordering enough. You may be ordering on time, but you did not accurately predict consumer demand. So if you didn't order enough, you have to wait for it to be, you know, extracted from your supply chain or possibly even manufactured. And then there's situation around unpredictable consumer behavior. I know I keep bringing up toilet paper, but that was top of the news two years ago for sure, for a good while. But also bikes, fishing equipment, weight training equipment, and all of those make sense when you look back on them. People had more time. They weren't commuting to work as much or at all. So fishing and bike riding, or maybe even furloughed and laid off caused more fishing and bike riding to occur. I know we had trouble getting a used bike. Every time a good one or even a bad one went for sale on Facebook marketplace, it was an hour. That's all it lasted. People were buying them sight unseen. And then weight training equipment with all of the closings of the gym the gyms that we all belong to, The weight training equipment flew off the shelves as well. Well, once it does that, they speed up delivery from the distribution center that they've got staged for the next time they need to deliver it. They speed that up to the store, and then they speed it up from the, you know, the manufacturers store or storehouse and bring that forward. But at some point, you have so much demand that you're waiting on things to actually be manufactured and you just don't speed that up. Those are typically utilized twenty four hours a day. So managing that supply chain is complex task. It requires a lot more information than just how much do we expect to sell and when, or how much do we expect to need for our retailers that are buying from us, you also need to know your real time stock levels and that's where RFID helps tremendously. This gives you confidence in your logs and your records, and gives you the ability to be flexible in your decision making so that you can change course confidently. So how does that work? Typically, the best case is to apply the RFID tags at the point of manufacture After that, everything else gets easier. Inbound audits, outbound audits at every step of the way, are at the item level, not just the SKU level, where you know the style color and size, but of the same style and color and size, you know the difference between the first one and the second instance. So your inbound and outbound audit become more complete, you're able to do more than just ten percent or two percent, you're able to do a hundred percent. And discrepancies are much easier to research. That's really fascinating. And I suppose kind of what you're describing just adding visibility throughout the supply chain right and seeing having a little bit more transparency as far as where things are at what time, how many, all of that sort of thing. Every bit of that helps. Visibility, transparency, and accurate stock levels help the accuracy see the speed, the efficiency, and it reduces safety stock. That makes everything move smoother. So it sounds like we could have used a little bit more RFID kind throughout the pandemic. Right? It certainly would have helped at at various points like you mentioned, the toilet paper example. But does datas can work with RFID within the supply We sure do. We have a great partnership with Froquential, a European provider of Octoplus, which is World class software to manage RFID tags. Okay. And it can happen throughout the supply chain. We have solutions for the manufacturing, the distribution centers, as well as the stores? It's really, really exciting. And it's it's exciting to talk about this partnership appear on the show and and learn a little bit more about it. So Herb, I think that does it for another episode of the show talking about this time about supply chain management and how RFID plays a part in it. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode. Thank you, Tyler. Absolutely. Well, everyone, this was the third of a five part series and so we have more episodes upcoming, including some cool uses for RFID within the retail landscape. So you don't want to miss that episode coming up next here in the series, but for this one for her billings, I'm Tyler Kern. We'll talk to you again soon on another episode of Herb Satakes.
