# RFID projects risk failure when IT or store ops owns them alone

By MarketScale Newsroom · Published 2026-11-13 · Retail on MarketScale
Canonical: https://www.marketscale.com/industries/retail/rfid-projects-fail-when-it-or-store-ops-owns-them-alone-1314960

> DataScan’s Kelsey Grolig and Carlos Rego outline an RFID readiness framework and warn IT-only or ops-only ownership carries a high risk of failure.

## Key points

- Carlos Rego of DataScan says RFID projects owned only by IT or only by store operations carry a high probability of failure; Grolig stresses executive sponsorship and a cross-functional program leader to align teams and the road map.
- American Eagle moved from 95% to 99% inventory accuracy across more than 500 stores over nearly two years, according to NRF, showing the final points of accuracy take sustained operational work rather than a hardware swap.
- RAIN RFID chip shipments fell to 42.7 billion in 2025 from a 2024 record on tariffs and retail destocking, the RAIN Alliance said in April 2026, so market timing shapes rollout pace alongside organizational readiness.

Carlos Rego has watched RFID programs run into trouble for a reason that has nothing to do with tags or readers. Speaking in a pre-recorded webinar produced as a MarketScale Studio segment, the DataScan technical sales engineer told retailers that a project set up as an IT project, or as an operations-only project, carries a high probability of failure. His colleague Kelsey Grolig, a senior technical sales engineer at DataScan, opened the same session with a question rather than a product pitch: where is your organization today in its RFID journey?

Rego's warning comes from long exposure. He says he started in RFID at a Portuguese startup that built software for the Inditex Group, then for Fast Retailing, owner of the Uniqlo brand, and has since worked on deployments across Europe, Asia and Latin America. Grolig works with retailers at every stage, including some that paused RFID years ago and are now returning to it.

The timing matters because the cost objection has largely gone. NRF wrote in October 2025 that apparel tags once priced around 25 cents now cost less than a nickel each, citing American Eagle's senior vice president of business development, and that current readers pick up tags without line of sight and in bulk. When hardware stops being the hard part, the questions left are about people, process and ownership, which is where DataScan's framework lives.

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, uses a small tag that answers a reader's radio signal with its identity, so stock can be counted without an associate seeing or scanning each item. Grolig's framework asks three things of a retailer before any of that equipment is evaluated: understand the business problem, get organizational alignment, then build a road map that fits the pieces together.

## The one-sentence test comes before the reader count

Grolig asks retailers to explain their RFID initiative in one sentence before they evaluate a single tag. The drivers she hears most often are inventory accuracy that is not where it needs to be, omnichannel fulfillment that is creating problems, store teams spending too much time looking for product or counting it by hand, and wholesale partners or competitors moving to RFID. Any of those can start the conversation. Only one of them can anchor a pilot.

Her sample sentences are plain. A retailer focused on visibility might say it needs more reliable inventory data so stores and digital channels can make better decisions and increase sales. A retailer focused on omnichannel might say it wants to improve fulfillment by raising confidence in the inventory the system shows as available.

The omnichannel case shows why accuracy is the foundation. Buy online, pick up in store, or BOPIS, routes a customer's order to a store based on what the system believes is on hand; when the item is not actually there, the order fails in front of the customer, which Grolig calls one of the worst things that can happen. Rego recalls retailers that had begun omnichannel programs before the pandemic and then used RFID to fulfil online orders from stores when demand shifted.

Grolig describes the end state as trust. When the system says a store holds one unit, the team believes it, because RFID counted it that morning in a cycle count, a scheduled count of part of the stock rather than a once-a-year wall-to-wall tally. That trust lets retailers drop the safety stock they carry to cover for doubtful data, a change she describes as cultural as much as technical.

## American Eagle's climb from 95% to 99% took nearly two years

American Eagle lifted inventory accuracy from 95% to 99% across more than 500 stores, NRF wrote in October 2025. Every item in those stores now carries an RFID sensor in its tag, and the program ran alongside installation of a system that gives near real-time location data. The retailer started the effort nearly two years before the article, by NRF's account.

Inventory accuracy means the share of items for which the system record matches what is physically in the store. NRF's piece puts the achievable level with current readers above 98%, with shorter cycle counts, better replenishment and fewer stockouts following. Greg Buzek of IHL Group told NRF that accuracy has become one of the primary value drivers, because the inventory record now feeds sales, marketing and AI forecasting, and in apparel every record carries size, color and season.

An independent academic case study shows how far a first RFID step can carry a smaller operation. In a paper presented in August 2025 at the Asia Pacific International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, researchers found that a Peruvian jeans manufacturer moved finished-goods record accuracy from 85% to 95% with RFID gates and handheld readers, cut registration time from 2.6 hours to 0.49 hours and shortened lead time by 35%.

Set those two results side by side and the readiness argument appears. Hardware took the Peruvian plant a ten-point gain, to 95%. American Eagle started at 95% and needed nearly two years of store-by-store work to reach 99%. For an operator weighing a pilot, the distance between those two numbers is the distance the organization, rather than the equipment, has to travel.

## Why a single-owner project carries the failure risk

Rego says RFID projects owned solely by IT, or solely by operations, carry a high probability of failure. He has seen both patterns in deployments, and he explains the reason in terms of what happens after go-live rather than during installation.

The truths he means are inventory truths: the system says a size is in stock and the shelf says otherwise. That is why the project needs support from the top before the first count, he argues, because the data will force decisions that cross departmental lines.

Grolig translates that into roles. The business team that owns the problem has to be in the room, along with an executive sponsor who can align priorities and resources, and the internal and external partners who touch the program, since several vendors are involved in any RFID deployment. Store operations and IT are the departments she most often sees owning the project, and above the owner sits a cross-functional program leader who holds the road map and the decisions to move along it. Rego adds that software is the central player in that arrangement, because it is the piece that makes tag suppliers, reader vendors and back-end systems work toward one result.

Academic research backs the ownership point. A systematic review of 109 peer-reviewed articles, published in the Journal of Digital Economy in 2025, examined RFID in supply chain management through socio-technical systems theory, the idea that an implementation succeeds only when the technical system and the people and structures around it are designed together, and sorted the success factors into social and technical subsystems. A May 2024 narrative review in the Sinergi International Journal of Logistics named interoperability problems, resistance to change and high initial costs as the barriers that keep holding RFID adoption back, and recommended standardization and workforce training in response.

Neither review attaches a percentage to projects owned by one department, and Rego's warning rests on deployments he has seen rather than a published failure rate. Grolig defines readiness the same broad way: whether the organization as a whole is positioned to adopt RFID, use the data, support the process changes and create long-term value, with the technology itself only one part of that question. Organizational ownership is one piece of that picture, which is a way of saying it cannot carry the project on its own either.

## Zara built its program store by store, then brand by brand

Inditex lifted Zara's inventory accuracy from about 65% to above 95%, RFID News UK wrote in April 2026. The trade outlet describes a full rollout across more than 2,000 stores using UHF RAIN RFID tags embedded in garment security labels. RAIN RFID is the passive ultra-high-frequency form of the technology used for item-level retail tagging, and each tag carries an Electronic Product Code, a unique number for the individual garment rather than for its SKU.

The account also describes the operational work behind the result. Store staff moved from barcode counts that took days to full-floor RFID counts that take hours, weekly cycle counts became routine, and the company invested in antenna placement and tag orientation because metal fixtures and dense displays interfere with UHF signals. Redistribution decisions between cities that once took days now happen within hours, by RFID News UK's account, and other Inditex brands including Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear and Bershka followed with their own programs.

Inditex's own words show how gradual the path was. The company announced in its 2015 annual report that RFID, which it had applied to Zara stock management over the preceding years, was being extended to more of the brand's stores and markets, alongside self-checkout tills, where garments are identified with RFID before being bagged, and interactive fitting rooms that let customers request sizes and colors from a tablet in the cabin. The same report describes ongoing store-employee training programmes with named people in each team responsible for a result, the kind of store-level ownership Grolig says RFID programs need.

Inditex does not say in that material who owned the RFID program internally or how store operations and IT divided the work. What the two accounts show, taken together, is a program that spread from one brand's stock management to self-checkout, fitting rooms and sister brands over more than a decade, going by the dates of the two documents. Rego's framework treats that spread as the normal shape of an RFID journey, with stages a retailer moves through rather than a single switch-on.

## Two scorecards for one pilot

Rego frames RFID value on two axes: operational speed in the store and sales uplift from shelf availability. On the first, counts and store processes run faster and accuracy rises. On the second, the store sells more because the right size is on the floor, which he says is no miracle, only availability the store did not have before.

He adds two customer-facing cases to the revenue side. Long queues on peak sales days shrink or disappear with RFID at the point of sale, he says, and Inditex describes self-checkout units where garments are identified with RFID at payment; fitting rooms, he adds, are another place where the technology can shape the visit.

Grolig turns those axes into a business case. DataScan works with retailers on return on investment calculators that list the KPIs tied to the chosen problem: inventory accuracy, product availability, customer service, fulfillment performance and, through all of them, sales. Rego says the KPIs are defined together ahead of time and measured along the pilot or proof of concept over a set period, and the outcomes of those KPIs are what a team takes to its board to show a return on investment within a certain timeframe.

The discipline she stresses most is scope. There is a long list of later use cases, loss prevention, always-on inventory and automated replenishment among them, and she tells retailers to hold them back and keep the pilot on the primary problem, because a focused pilot keeps the team engaged and produces the return that funds the next step. Rego adds the piece he thinks often goes unsaid: the product of all this is data accurate enough to act on, and the business decisions built on it are where the value finally lands.

## Chip shipments fell in 2025, and that cuts both ways

RAIN chip shipments fell to 42.7 billion in 2025, down from a 2024 record, the RAIN Alliance said in April 2026. The association compiles shipment data from four tag chip makers, EM Microelectronic, Impinj, NXP and Shanghai Quanray Electronics, and attributed the decline to a semiconductor inventory cycle that had days of inventory running 26 days above the ten-year median at the start of 2025, to tariff uncertainty that dampened U.S. apparel and general retail demand, and to retail destocking.

That complicates a thesis built on readiness. Apparel and general retail make up a large share of RAIN RFID demand, by the alliance's account, so when tariffs and destocking slowed retailers' buying, tag volumes fell regardless of how aligned any one organization was. Market conditions set part of the pace. The alliance also notes the market has grown 50% over four years and that new deployments and program expansions continued through 2025, which fits Grolig's point that organizations need not move in step.

Two developments in the same report change the readiness math for the coming years. The European Union's Digital Product Passport will require manufacturers across many product categories to attach verifiable lifecycle and sustainability data to their goods, and RAIN RFID has been accepted as a qualified data carrier for it. RAIN-enabled enterprise smartphones have been shipping for several quarters, and Decathlon gave live RAIN-enabled smartphone demonstrations at NRF and Euroshop in 2026, by the alliance's account.

The RAIN Alliance frames readiness at the level of an industry, noting that each sector sits at its own stage of adoption with its own timelines, procurement cycles and technology readiness levels. Grolig's framework puts the same question to a single retailer, and competitors moving to RFID is one of the drivers she lists. Rego says some retailers explore RFID because they see it as a market trend and are content to be the second or third mover; Grolig calls that positive peer pressure from the competition.

## Five stages, and the next step from each

DataScan maps retailers onto five stages, from investigating the technology to scaling a proven business case. Rego lists them: investigating the technology itself out of curiosity; exploring and defining the business problem; preparing by building alignment and the business case; testing assumptions through a proof of concept or pilot; and scaling what the pilot proved. He says retailers arrive at DataScan at every one of those points, and the help they need differs at each.

Grolig's test for whether RFID is even the right answer sits between the second and fourth stages. Inventory accuracy, omnichannel fulfillment and store process efficiency fit the technology well, she says, and some problems do not. The way a retailer finds out is definition and discovery work that names the problem and the desired outcome, then a focused pilot built to prove or disprove that the problem was solved, before any decision to go further.

Grolig says the first move for a retailer at any stage is the question she opened with, locating itself on that map, because who needs to be in the room and what the pilot measures both depend on the answer.

## Sources

- [How RFID is helping transform the retail customer experience](https://nrf.com/blog/how-rfid-is-helping-transform-the-retail-customer-experience) (NRF)
- [RAIN Alliance Reports 42.7 Billion Tag Chip Shipments in 2025](https://therainalliance.org/rain-alliance-reports-42-7-billion-tag-chip-shipments-in-2025/) (RAIN Alliance)
- [Digital transformations of supply chain management via RFID technology: A systematic literature review](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773067025000196) (Journal of Digital Economy)
- [Optimizing Inventory Systems with RFID: A Narrative Review of Integration, Efficiency, and Barriers](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391072841_Optimizing_Inventory_Systems_with_RFID_A_Narrative_Review_of_Integration_Efficiency_and_Barriers) (Sinergi International Journal of Logistics)
- [RFID-Enabled Inventory Accuracy Improvement in a Peruvian Textile Manufacturer: A Case Study](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397354116_RFID-Enabled_Inventory_Accuracy_Improvement_in_a_Peruvian_Textile_Manufacturer_A_Case_Study) (Asia Pacific International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management)

Tags: DataScan, RFID, inventory accuracy, retail, store operations, omnichannel fulfillment

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