How JD Sports got RFID stock counts into 414 stores in about three months

At 414 JD Sports stores across the UK and Ireland, a stock count is now done on foot. Staff attach an RFD40 UHF RFID sled to the Zebra mobile computer that is already part of their daily work. They then move through the sales floor and stockroom, passing the reader over rails and shelves. As it picks up each tagged item within range, the total builds live on the screen. According to Zebra Technologies, the company has helped JD Sports reach 98% on-shelf availability and replenish 20% faster.

For a retail operations leader, the calendar may be the most useful part. According to Zebra, the first store went live in 76 days, and the rollout reached 414 locations across the UK and Ireland in roughly three months. The deployment model could help explain that pace: associates clip the RFID sled onto the mobile computer they already use, so the core device in their hands stays the same.

Omnichannel is what pushed JD toward better counts. The retailer, which sells brands like Nike, Adidas and New Balance, has nearly 5,000 stores across 46 countries. Promising one-hour click-and-collect or delivery within 30 minutes only works reliably when the stock count is accurate. Zebra says that as the retailer scaled, it kept struggling with inventory visibility in stores.

Counting stock by walking the aisles

The mechanics are simple enough to teach on a first shift. The sled reads every tagged item within range as the associate moves through the floor and stockroom, and in some stores a single pass covers the whole building. Stores can schedule the sweep anywhere from twice a week to daily, which keeps the shelves and the inventory management system in step.

For operators who promise one-hour click-and-collect, that cadence could be the real change, because the promise can only be as reliable as the most recent stock count behind it. Stores can run the process twice a week, or even daily. According to the release, the same visibility also lets teams spot and investigate loss much sooner. Instead of holding off until an audit every 90 or 180 days, they can see where the loss is occurring.

Replenishment is where the counts reach the sales floor. Store associates now move 95% more inventory from the storeroom to the shop floor and spend less time on stock counting, according to the release. Zebra frames the goal as getting high-demand sizes from the storeroom to the shelf when and where customers want them, which suggests how a more frequent count could turn into the 20% replenishment gain.

The rollout math behind 414 stores

JD set its requirements before the hardware was chosen. It wanted real-time inventory visibility that could support omnichannel selling, that store assistants would find easy to use, and that could roll out quickly across stores, according to the release. A five-store pilot tested the TC2 and RFD40 pairing for faster tag reads at greater range.

Every figure in the timeline below, like the 98% and 20% results, comes from Zebra's Nov. 4 press release. Chain Store Age and Supply Chain Dive carried the same numbers from that release, so the grid reflects one company account rather than three independent confirmations. Once the pilot proved out, the schedule looked like this.

For a chain sizing its own program, the pace of 26 stores a week comes from one retailer's UK and Ireland estate, so it works best as a sanity check on a project plan. The work was split across several pieces:

• Zebra Technologies: TC2 Series mobile computers and RFD40 UHF RFID sleds
• Renovotec, a Zebra Premier Solution Partner: led the device deployment
• Checkpoint Systems, a Zebra Registered ISV: integrated its ItemOptix software for a single view of inventory data across the retailer
• Zebra OneCare: lets associates address everyday wear and tear and accidental damage by swapping devices at no cost

The service plan is easy to skim past on a spec sheet. If counts are meant to run daily, a no-cost swap for a broken unit could decide whether a store skips a sweep or not. Daniel McGrath, JD's head of customer operations, put the appeal in plain terms in the release:

Read alongside the 26-stores-a-week average, that description points to where the time was saved. A device that needs little more than unboxing on site shifts the hard work to configuration before shipment, which is the part a central team and a deployment partner can do once for hundreds of stores.

JD's record of quick device rollouts

The RFID rollout is not the only store device project JD has run recently. In January 2025, according to Chain Store Age, DTLR and Shoe Palace, both JD Sports banners, started installing Adyen Castle S1E2L Android all-in-one devices running Jumpmind's Commerce and Inventory solutions, covering 450 store locations nationwide between them. The two brands also recently moved the registers, fixed and mobile, at 200 more DTLR and Shoe Palace stores onto the Jumpmind Commerce platform. They completed the switch in a single day without needing any staff on site.

Those 200 stores were City Gear locations that JD Sports acquired and rebranded. Beyond payments, the setup gives associates multi-language and multi-currency support at the point of sale, lets them check customers out from anywhere on the sales floor, and supports "endless aisle" fulfillment through integration with existing order management systems.

The two programs use different vendors and solve different problems, one at checkout and one in the stockroom. Taken together, they could point to a preference for store technology that needs little on-site setup. They also share a dependency: endless aisle, like one-hour click-and-collect, sells against what the system says is available, so both would only be as reliable as the inventory data underneath them. For operators comparing RFID proposals, rollout effort deserves a line in the evaluation alongside read performance.

Reading the 98% before copying it

The strongest reason for caution is scope. The 98% and 20% figures come from JD and Zebra, measured at stores where the technology is running, and those are 414 of nearly 5,000 locations, all in the UK and Ireland. The release does not define how on-shelf availability is counted, whether by product or by size, or on the sales floor versus anywhere in the building.

The framing is also a vendor's. Mark Thomson, Zebra's Retail Strategy Director EMEA, said in the release that retailers like JD Sports "demonstrate the effectiveness of Zebra's Modern Store framework." The wording of the metrics can drift in retelling, too. The release says associates move 95% more inventory from storeroom to floor, while Supply Chain Dive's summary says they move over 95% of inventory. One is a change and the other is a share, so the primary wording is the one to quote in a business case.

None of that makes the number weak. It makes it a number to compare carefully before it goes into a business case. For chains whose availability problem sits mainly in the stockroom-to-floor handoff, JD's results are a close comparison. For chains whose gaps start upstream, at the distribution center or the supplier, a faster in-store count may fix less.

Grocers are chasing the same shelf metric

JD is not alone. Supply Chain Dive notes that Walmart and Kroger are also turning to RFID for better inventory management. For Walmart, the goals are cutting food waste and keeping products fresh. Kroger is after better on-shelf availability and higher sales. The goods these retailers sell could hardly be more different, yet each one is using RFID to get a tighter grip on inventory.

The next test sits across the Atlantic. Chain Store Age counts more than 2,500 JD stores in North America, where DTLR and Shoe Palace already run Jumpmind on Android devices. Whether handheld RFID follows into that estate, and whether the 26-stores-a-week pace holds there, would show how well the UK results travel.

The parent's footprint makes that question bigger than one banner. JD Group, founded in 1981, operates under names including JD, Size?, Courir, DTLR, Shoe Palace, Hibbett, Sprinter, Sport Zone, Cosmos and Go Outdoors. Each is its own store estate, so any further rollout would test whether a model built on unboxing and a quick sweep holds up outside the UK and Ireland stores where it was proven.