Roundtable: The Implementation of RFID Technology and Its Impact on Retail

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our roundtable event today. Talking all about RFID. We're gonna dive in and really get in-depth on RFID today with a panel of experts. This is all brought you by DataScan. I'm your host today, Tyler Kern, and let me introduce our panel of experts here for you today. Starting off with Adrian Thomas, President and CEO of DataScan. Adrian, well, welcome. Thank you very much in detail. Good to see you again. Good to see you. Good to have you here as well. We're also joined today by Her Billings VP of product strategy at DataScan Herb. Welcome back. Thanks. It's good to see you, Tyler. Good to have you here as well. And new person joining the cast here today if you haven't been following along with DataScan's podcast and some of our other series that we've been doing Max Dunn is the the new one joining the crew here. Today, he's the manager of RFID Solutions at Data Scan. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here, and Seeing if I can keep up with these two guys. A lot to keep up with because we are going to dive in deep on RFID and go around the horn a little bit and talk some of these solutions, what they provide for and so so much more. But first of all, Adrian, let's start off just talking about the general state of retail right now. Tell me about some of the trends that you're seeing in the industry right now and just where things stand? Okay. I think, you know, we're obviously talking in a post COVID world now. Right. And we saw this trend starting before COVID, but it's really accelerated beyond that now, and that's omni channel. Mhmm. And that's the ability for us as a consumer's to be able to buy from different sources and have them provided by the retailer at a location or from a distribution center direct to their home. So that omnichannel drive has expanded out substantially over the last eighteen months. And I think that's you know, we're now seeing that as a consumer led requirement for retail, and that's been given the retailer's a significant challenge given all of the supply chain issues that they've been having over the last two years. That's right. So we're some of that I think is driving some of the need for RFID, and we'll get into some of the discussion around that as we get into how things are changing for data scan. I think there's a third component, which is a critical factor for the profitability of retail and that is their own labor -- Mhmm. -- shortage. We're seeing that amongst our own clients that people are cutting back on install labor, and they're still requiring that obviously the sales, the brick and mortar sales are still required to be at or above previous levels, but they're using less people And so the inventory management within the store is becoming critical, and we're seeing that as a driver behind, again, some of these needs to keep perpetual inventory. And I think that's the key for us. I don't know, data scan. We've been in the perpetual inventory market for some time. We've talked a lot in previous episodes about inventory accuracy. Mhmm. And I think today we'll see RFIDs can be used to really hone in on that inventory accuracy for retail in the store. It can work back up into the supply chain as well, but the critical factor can I have have I got the right product in the right store at the right time? So the inventory accuracy is critical. Barcode has been used for that as we know for for many years. But the explosion that we're seeing in the omnichannel world is requiring that perpetual inventory accuracy be really true for for most retailers now. And I think there's another component that we're seeing, and that's loss prevention. Yeah. And there's is a lot of talk going on around the increase in crime, whether that's internal or internal theft or external theft. We talked to a retailer recently, in fact, two days ago, and they were having supply chain issues because product was being shipped from the manufacturer -- Mhmm. -- direct to the store, and there was theft. There was theft at the manufacturer, there was theft in distribution, and then some of the product didn't actually reach the store when it got to the facility. Wow. So you know, retail is suffering from supply chain shortages based on external theft and loss issues. So I think those are key things that we see today as driving the need for the use of alternative technologies beyond just I would say simple bar code. To be able to understand how inventory is moving through the supply chain and ultimately what inventory is in the store for them to be able to sell, either to you and I as a visiting individual to a store, or as us buying online either having it shipped from store or buy online and picking up in the store. So those are the key four or five things that we see as driving the sort of interest and explosion in in the adoption of RFID. So, Max, that brings us really nicely to to talk a little bit about the adoption and the implementation within the retail environment of ID? What are you seeing in this area right now? What are some of the successes? What are some of the challenges? Kind of talk us through that? Yeah. So, I mean, over the last twenty or so years, right, there's been a numerous amount of different RFID implementations. If you go back to the early days right was mostly at the case and palate level. Tags were pretty expensive. The hardware wasn't as great. Right? It it couldn't read a whole lot of tags at once, fast forward to to today, and it's it's incredible how much the technologies advance the the readers, you really can't find a bad reader on the marketplace. Right? Hardware is gonna be doing a great job of capturing the tags. And then tags, they've gotten cheaper. They've gotten more sensitive. You're you're able to read much more at once. So it's really been incredible to see the different types of use cases that have come out from these different implementations. Right? So even with just basic inventory accuracy and and retailers being able to see every item that's coming into the store right through receiving, being able to go through replenish. So that way, the shopper has items that are available out on the sales floor for them to being able to capture that at the point of sale. And and then be able to even extend that into loss prevention. Right? So if you have the ability to see what's happening at your point of sale, you can flag things that's sold or not sold, and then start to gain visibility to what's leaving your store, whether it be in baskets or maybe a a green shopper perspective, right, to see kinda what items are being paired together. Which is maybe useful for marketing and and and customer engagement versus what's going outside of my store with with no sale. Right? And Obviously, today, loss prevention, again, there's higher ranges of really what this death threshold is for a felony, and it's challenging to to be able to kinda pursue that. So being able to aggregate cases over time, right, because some of these orc organized retail crime rings they'll come in and they'll stay under a certain threshold to make sure that they're not gonna get dinged, right, by the by the law enforcement. So you're able to pull in more evidence around that and that you're able to help with pulling together better cases for prosecution as well as kind of gain better evidence to towards merchandise recovery and ultimately bring back some of that merchandise you're stealing. So from from a hardware perspective and implementation, right, circling back, it's gotten to a point where you're you're opening up numerous new use cases, and it's it's gonna be interesting to see even over the next few years kind of what what some of our our partners and and customers start to figure out on kinda where do we kinda continue to drive RFID adoption into the marketplace. Max, you're absolutely right. And of course, with your four years of previous experience, that is something that you've had a front row seat for. Another use case that we've seen is display compliance. In the brick and mortar world, if the item is not in front of you, then you're not actually going to to buy it. Right. That's part of the replenishment use case, but it's it's making sure that there's one of every style and possibly every color on the floor. We know of one retailer, a major shoe retailer that display compliance was their primary use case for implementing RFID. Now there's almost always a primary use case. It's what proves out the ROI for the retailer. Once you have that primary use case, you now have a foundation, a technological foundation that allows you to add on the other use cases -- Mhmm. -- a lot less for a lot less money, and the ROI of the incremental use cases is a lot better. But display compliance is one of them. And another that we've been, you know, really tied to for a very long time, both in barcode and in RFID is inventory record accuracy. As I mentioned, you're in the you're in the brick and mortar store. You're shopping the item that's in front of your face. Right? You know it's there, you know it's available, you know it's a good quality. In the online world, anything in the omnichannel You don't. You are actually shopping what the retailer thinks they have. That is the inventory records. In the bar vote world. This this shocked me when I first found out about it. We we've had the ability to look at our clients variances over many years, in the barcode world if you're counting once or twice a year, near the end of that period, Only thirty five percent of your records are accurate. Only thirty five. So what happens with the others that are inaccurate, some of time some of the time, you're out of stock and you don't know it. That's right. Some of the time, you're over stock and you don't know it. And then there's the edge cases so that out of stock, you know, you you might try to sell that online when you don't really have it, and the other is the overstock where you don't know you can sell it online, but but you actually do have it. So there's a lot of spence for retailers involved with incorrect stock levels. You might not replenish on time. It could be a future out of stock condition. It's it's something we dove into you and I in one of the previous Herb's hot takes. That's right. That's right. We have previous episodes of of both data scans podcast, but also herb Sot takes where we dive into a a lot of these topics in a little bit more depth than we're able spend today unless we wanna be here for three hours or so. So so go check out some of those other episodes and some of those other series that we've we've created over the past year or so because you're right. Just dive in a little bit there, Todd. I'd have to pick up on the whole ROI issue. And what I think we're seeing now is that there is more than one use case -- Mhmm. -- for RFID, not just in the store, but in the greater supply chain for retail. So while Max is absolutely right, costs have come down. Solutions have stabilized in terms of the technical capability, but it for retailers looking at RO at the ROI, they can see, well, I don't have to rely on one single use case to get my ROI we might start with one because we you know, there is a learning curve as to how to use the technology. But ultimately over time, there are multiple points where the ROI can can bring value. And I think that's something that, you know, we've seen retailers say, well, I want to start just by tagging up my items in the store and maybe maybe counting them. But then beyond that, there's a vision of how do I track product, how maybe even how do I track product in relation to the consumer and what they actually do from a behavioral standpoint. Yeah. You know, we had a I was talking to a retailer the other day and they were saying, well, we we want to be able to track product from the shop floor into the changing room. Right? Then how does the how does the consumer deal with that? Do they ask for a different size? Do they ask for a different color, how many times do they take product in and out of the changing room, and then how many items that they actually take to the changing room do they buy? Right? So it's an interesting concept that retailers are thinking about data. Yeah. Right? And how do I use that capture and use that data to improve the shopping experience and effectively maximize sales. So I think that whole ROI conversation is is much greater than just I know we hone in on inventory accuracy, right? Right. But it's much greater than that in terms of the impact that it can have in the retail world. And Max, just to go back to you for a second, are there certain segments of the market where you've seen this ROI and seen maybe great success amongst, you know, a certain segment of of retail, be it convenience stores or, you know, something else along those lines? Yeah. So traditionally, I mean, apparel's been the the one space where we've seen the most access. Right? It it became the easiest to really tag at a service bureau. Right? Because you had the hose coming from manufacturing, they all get in one place, and then you can apply the RF tag. As you start to move to hard goods, the the source tagging becomes a little bit more challenging. Right? Because it gets pushed back to that manufacturing process. But we are starting to see, as Adrian mentioned, right, some some retailers looking to maybe I have a couple high really high shrink items that I wanna gather a little bit more insight on. So maybe I look at tagging some couple categories of high shrink items, and then maybe use that not only for inventory accuracy and making sure that it's it's on of available on the shelf, but also to be able to take a look at what what's leaving my store without being bought. And then how do I take that data and up applied maybe maybe a little bit better loss prevention or merchandise protection strategies back to that segment to better be proactive about losing some items Also, we're seeing actually quite a bit of interest in the quick serve restaurant industry. So a number of very large quick serve restaurants that I'm sure everyone has been to and frequented. They are actually looking at end to end supply chain visibility. So working with some other suppliers from a food perspective and being able to see lot and batch number, expiration date, right, and be able to track for maybe some recall purposes. As well as looking at kind of some customer experiential items in the store. Right? So moving to as as Adrian mentioned, a little bit there's a little bit of a labor shortage going on right now. So not having the same amount of workers in your store, maybe you moved to more of a kiosk and and self order strategy, and and we've seen some Quick serve restaurants actually move to RFID enabling that process. So once you order, you can actually take a card or a chip right that has RFID tag over to your table, and they have readers throughout the restaurant to help delimited amount of workers, be able to deliver your order to you. Convenience, we we're starting to see again some influx of source tagging right in some of the hard good space. So everyone knows Walmart is one of the biggest retailers in the world. They've had a ton of success with their apparel program. Over eighty percent of all their apparel is tagged with RFID in their stores. And had so much success that they're expanding into other categories. Right? So they've moved into sporting goods. They've moved into electronic into toys, actually, into car batteries and tires, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. So you're starting to see a lot of other types of retailers, right, that are benefiting from this. Because when they're when they're mandating some of their suppliers to start beginning to tag at source for them, there becomes a certain threshold where the supplier says it probably just makes sense to tag everything with this, and then let me experience some of the benefits in my own supply chain, right? So then other retailers who procure some of these goods from these different suppliers are then able to leverage that in their own environment as well. We've seen that specifically with one of our clients who is waiting for one of the Walmart mandates to filter through to the product that they overlap with. And that's a tagging and process change are the two hardest things to do when you implement RFID. And tagging is what we're talking about now is is, you know, when Walmart has their mandate, Dillard's has a mandate as well, they're saying we we need this product source tagged with RFID. Once a manufacturer hits about forty percent of an item that's required to have RFID, they just go ahead and do the whole thing. It doesn't pay them to have, you know, two sets of stock that they're going to be shipping out, and it might be helpful to use this one, but it's got the wrong tag on it. That doesn't work for them. So it's it's a really big deal. In the food space, we have been reading, and everybody probably knows this, that the FDA is going to mandate tracking and tracing in the food supply chain. That's what's prompting a lot of the RFID activity in that space. Right now, when you have a food recall, it has to be pretty wide to make sure that you cover, you know, everybody that could get sick. With and and then it takes a little bit of time. It takes a few days to get that information out because you wanna make sure you're right. And don't say the entire, you know, continent of North America needs to recall this item. Using RFID will enable them to get much faster at the notification of a recall, as well as make it a lot tighter. So it'll save companies money in the long run. It'll save lives as well. And it's a really good implementation of this technology. I'm just gonna toss this out there to the group and anybody that wants to chime in on this can address it, but has RF ID grown in terms of its accessibility by price going down so more people can get in a little bit easier and test the waters like Adrian was talking about, you know, you might just test with one particular use case and then grow to others. Has the accessibility grown so that more and more people are able to do that and thus RFID is is growing and becoming more common? You wanna take that one back, sir? Because you, you know, you've been living and breathing this for me, you know. Yeah. Sure. So, yes, it has. Right? So seeing the the the cost and and tags has probably gone down by probably close to fifty percent. Right? So at at scale, right, that opens up a lot more that you can do with it, especially when you have a set budget, and now your tags only cost half as much, right, to to be able to enact and and get the most value out of your program. You can do a lot more from a hardware perspective. Right? So traditionally, a lot of retailers use mobile handhelds to to walk around and capture tags. Right? So you had a a moving reader with with static tags. And then shifting kind of the dynamic to today is with the cost of readers going down, with the cost of tags going down, you have the ability to implement more unique use cases. Right? So being able to implement readers from back to front and be able to automate the replenishment. Right? So you can see that you have items in your stock room. Once they walk through a critical kind of controlled point, right, that you RFID implemented, then it'll actually pull that inventory and it's positioned to your sales floor for you. So that way, you you always have visibility of what you have. That's available for your your customers to to go out and buy. We're also seeing it again enabling exit readers. I know we've talked about this a lot, but The cost of that has gone down significantly. So instead of having an alarm go off at your door, that, quite frankly, you you can't necessarily act on today. Right? Because retailers are not allowing their employees to go put themselves in harm's way, which I mean, it makes sense. You you see a lot of violent crime associated with organized retail crime right now. So they're they're kinda hanging back. So that becomes almost a nuisance. So being able to enable that with RFID, you're able to gain the visibility, keep your employees safe and then go back retroactively and be able to say, what could have we done better? Or how do we better understand what items are being stolen? And then maybe there's some investigation that goes on. Right? It's all in all, it's gotten less expensive, and Herb, I don't know if if you've got any other kind of good examples, right, where you've seen a maybe one of your customers that's been traditionally on the barcoding side and looking at RFID now just because cost is? Cost is a part of the ROI equation. Absolutely. We have seen several retailers, and it it still follows that if you have fewer vendors you're going to be able to implement RFID faster. You have fewer cats to herd to get the tagging done. But we know of several retailers that have implemented RFID recently and have moved pretty quickly from you know, zero to implement it and rolled out into all of their stores, and multiple use cases in those stores, starting with you know, it could be display compliance, it could be inventory record accuracy, but also moving on to to other things. The comment I will make on that is I think the you talked a little bit about accessibility and I think, you know, to Max's point, the cost is one component of that, but definitely has come down. But also the reliability of the other components. So you've got the reliability of the hardware that we touched on a little bit earlier on that nobody questions now, does the hardware work or not? Is there a risk associated with the ride by this brand or that brand. So there's some elimination of risk in that component. And I think from a software perspective, whereas that's why I think we'll get in a little bit into that later is why we are so so excited about our entry into the market. The software also has matured over the years. And so for a retailer looking at investing in RFID, the risks associated with the buying decision have diminished The costs have diminished, but to Herb's earlier point, it's really around process change -- Mhmm. -- right, which they've got to accept that they are gonna have to beg some process changes and that will have broader impacts throughout their organization than just in store and how do we interface with the POS system, whatever it might be. So I think the risks associated with making the initial decision have diminished It doesn't eliminate the challenges around implementation actually into the retail supply chain. Speaking of implementation I'm assuming that there are hybrid environments, right, where there's both a mixture of barcode and RFID I wanna come to you with this. Tell me how that works. How how does that mixture go? Give me some examples of of how people are navigating this challenge and maybe what some of the challenges are How much time do we have? Yes, hybrid is important because there are some physics challenges associated with RFID metals and liquid present their own challenges. And I was told there'd be no And those can those can be costly to tag in a workaround. They can be impossible to tag if you have specific merchandising requirements and you want it to look a certain way and you're not going to accept the workaround tag. Many retailers that have a wide variety of items item types often have a split between we can RFID tag these but we must remain with barcode only on these. A lot of times, that's in an eighty five, fifteen percent range. That's what we hear at Macy's. We know that there are other retailers that are also, say, you know, going to do the apparel, but leave the accessories and fragrances behind in the barcode world. You can still get tremendous benefit out of the RFID tags on the eighty five percent of the merchandise, or even fifty percent of the merchandise, we know of a sporting goods retailer that that puts RFID on on their shoes, so that they always know where the shoes are because there's significant amount of time in finding the right size of the right style for the right person. So you can get benefit by having a portion of your store with RFID and having the rest with barcode. Now once you do that, and I know I'm sort of going off of the inventory, the daily inventory management tasks that a retailer has and into the annual task. One of the annual tasks is to count your inventory in total and report that to your auditors. They sign off on it, and it gets reported to Wall Street. Many retailers do not trust the RFID counts to make their financial adjustments. They'll do it for their operational to make sure that they're on hands are correct for reordering, for, you know, website display, omnichannel display, But they still be many times, because of the hybrid environment, they wanna use the lowest common denominator to count everything thing. We actually are excited to have a future announcement to handle this to handle this in a way that everybody can trust the RFID counts. You'll leverage the productivity, the speed of RFID, the accuracy of the RFID counts and enhance the accuracy with additional process and procedure to to have confidence that you have everything. There are two big challenges with with RFID I'm sorry. That is actually incorrect. They're not big challenges, but they are challenges for the for the annual PI. Missing tags, and tags without items. Mhmm. In every count we've ever done, there are missing tags. So bar code, you know, we've got tremendous experience with that. We've we've visited stores on the night of of their counts, and there will be a hundred, two hundred items without tags. There's no way around that. You have the public, you know, handling all these items. In RFI in barcode, you have to see that. In order to scan it. So you know that this item doesn't have a tag, and you'll handle that as part of your accounting process. In RFID, the benefit is you don't need line of sight. Therefore, you're not going to see in a traditional RFID cycle count. You're not going see the items that don't have tags. You have to have a special step for somebody to go through and touch everything to make sure that there's a tech. That's a tag up party. It's it's called a number of things by different retailers, but it isn't a step that's necessary. Another thing is, with bar codes, nobody looks at a stack of bar codes without items and says, do I need to include this in my account? Nobody. But in the RFID world, if you have tags that don't have items, those will get read as if you did. We do know of several retailers that have an issue with this. I myself walked into a retailer that had RFID, and within five minutes, saw two tags on the floor. Ugh. Not associated not associated with an item. Now you don't know you might say, well, you should count that because it clearly fell off of an item on the rack, not necessarily. That item might have been carried out. That item might have been stolen. We don't know. So this has to be handled, and we we're gonna be excited early twenty three to hopefully announce a solution for that. It's what us in the media business call a tease. So stay tuned for for more on that. But So Adrian, we've been talking about just the high level overview of of the advancements of RFID, the benefits of it we currently are in the retail space, but we haven't really spoken specifically about data scan. So tell me a little bit about data scan's entry into the RFID world and what you're excited about and you're going about this. Okay. Great. But I'd you'll you'll notice in the into the panel today that two of us have a few gray hairs. Right? So so those we've been watching RFID for many, many years. I mean, the technology has been around for a long time. Mhmm. And I think Herb and I actually met together in an NRS in early twenty twenty, right? And we felt that the sentiment in the market was at that point that that RFID was now at the point of mass adoption. And we were very excited by that. Obviously, COVID had put a huge damper on that and probably a twelve, fifteen month break on the the the the the pace of the adoption. But we came back and and our our customers have been asking us for years, when are you gonna be an RFID? When when is Datascan gonna be able to offer an RFID solution? So we decided that midway through last year that that was something that we now wanted to bring to the market. And and we looked around at the best way to do that and combine that with what we believe is the strength of our business, which is our sort of consultative approach -- Right. -- to be able to engage with customer and pick up on some of the things that Max was alluding to earlier on, that, you know, it's not simple straightforward implementation. You've got to work with the retailer to understand the processes that they they have, what they're prepared to change, what they're not prepared to change, align that with some of the challenges that there are with some of the packaging, some of the product, and where do you apply tags. So we you know, in our barcode world, we work with retailers on a very much a consultative approach. It's definitely not you know, a plug and play, you know, technology sell. Okay, off you go, Tyler. You know, good luck, come and talk to us next year when you want to buy the next version. Yeah. You've got to work with retailer to be able to make this a success. And I think we've shown we've got a good track record in being able to do that. So we launched, you know, we launched an initiative in sort of mid twenty one, and you know Herb was sort of front and center upon this in terms of our selection process. So maybe just talk a little bit herb about how we sort of thought we wanted to approach the market and how we ended up with what we have today. Well, we have an excellent software development team. And we started by thinking, maybe we can do this. This is something that that we think we can handle. And so we we sort of put a timeline to it, and we said, we think that's going to take longer than we have. So we decided to find a partner, somebody that a company that had a a solid well respected RFID software system that we could work with and and represent in North America and to all of our clients all over the world. We found them after much due diligence and they were a late entry into the into the hopper. We found Fracconciel, Here in the US, we call them Friquential, because that's how it's spelled, but it's a French company that was looking for a North American partner at the time. The due diligence that we did, we opened the hood of their software development, we validated their tech stack, is up to date and very good. One of the things we're most happy with and they are most proud of and rightfully so is their clean user interface. One of the things you need in retail, really anywhere, but retail, especially, is simple intuitive, easy to use software. Mhmm. You don't need to spend a lot of time training your associates. You have high turnover, labor shortages, you don't need to spend a lot of time fishing through the software for what you need. This company has all of that. It is absolutely a wonderful system, and the user interface is something we hear from their clients as being one of the reasons they selected them. Yep. So we did do all of the due diligence necessary. We started to partner with them officially early this year, but it it started with some training and and exchanges late last And we have been, you know, just extremely pleased. They have a very similar culture to us. You know, we do whatever it takes. We have a long history of doing whatever it takes to get the client satisfied, to get their counts done. In the bar code world, you can't just say, you know, it just doesn't feel like it's working tonight, send your fifteen thousand employees who are there to take inventory home and just come back tomorrow night, you cannot do that, and we never have. Right. So we have found a similar culture with the folks at frequential and are very happy with our partnership. Anybody else wanna hear Herb do the French pronunciation again? And I feel like I need to go pop a bottle of Bordeaux or something like that now. That was that was excellent. That was excellent. So I'd love to hear from everyone just what you're most excited about. Far as kind of diving into the RFID space. Herb kind of brought up a lot of great aspects of this. But but tell us, you know, what's exciting about this endeavor from from your perspective? I mean, for me, as you know, we've been in traditionally in our barcode world, and we've been -- Mhmm. -- we feel we're very, very well placed in that industry. Adding the whole RFID component to it is very exciting for us as a company. You know, we're building a new team. Right? I mean, we've got expertise Herb mentioned. We've got good software expertise. We've got good hardware expertise in terms understanding of how scanners and readers work, but we don't have the RFID expertise. So bringing on Max and we brought on several other members of the team recently, and we're gonna continue to add to that is adding a whole new layer to the organization that we've never had before. It's bringing new disciplines, it's bringing new requirements, and it's absolutely bringing new energy to the organization, which is really exciting. And and and in the we we talk about it a lot internally. You know, people in the organization can see that, you know, we've got great relationships with existing customers, and now this is just extending the depth that we have with those those teams. Right. And our clients are excited. Right? Because, you know, they're now saying we've been we've been asking data scammed for something like this for years, you know, let's talk about it, let's accelerate the conversation. So it's it's it's extending the business reach. It's bringing in new talent into the organization, which for me is really exciting. And then getting us that positive reaction from our retail community to say, great. Now let's talk because that, you know, we want to move ahead quickly. So those are the things that excite me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, my employment start date pre dates everybody at DataScan. I'm the old guy. And I am extremely excited about this. I've lived through several technology changes in how we help retailers with their inventory accuracy. And this is the most exciting one yet. We partner with eighteen of the top one hundred retailers according to NRF. We have over two hundred and fifty clients in over forty countries. We are very proud of those relationships, and we're very happy to offer to them this new technology that every one of them needs. Just it's a turnkey solution that that we can offer. It's not just the hardware, not just the software, not just the tags. It's also the professional services with the consultative approach that Adrian was mentioning earlier. It is tremendously exciting for me to see this. Max with the being the person with the the least amount of gray hair up here. Yeah. I think yeah. We won't talk about me. But but being in the position that you're in, tell me just about about the excitement of coming to a company with such a rich history in inventory accuracy and then kind of being a part of launch this whole new direction and endeavor that that really does help go more in-depth with clients that that have been with DataScan for a long Yeah. So, I mean, you nailed it right, the the rich history on the the inventory counting accuracy. Right? It gives you such a great backbone to be able to build off of. So for me, in my position, and looking out at the team, and kind of taking the traditional bar code, kind of approach that and then introducing a new technology. It's maybe just a new way to go about it, but you're still solving the same challenges for your customers, maybe adding on a few different secondary or tertiary use cases in the middle of that too. But it's really exciting for me. And the the most exciting part for me is taking all the wonderful things that Herb and Adrian just mentioned right around the our our partnership around the software piece. Right? Our our partnership with best of breed hardware providers. The quickly growing team that has been great so far taking the consultative approach to professional services and pulling that all together, right, as a systems integrator and kind of being a one stop shop for our customers to help them not only either start to adopt RFID, right, or maybe look at where where am I currently at in my RFID evolution and maybe I can leverage my partnership that I currently have with DataScan or a new partnership with DataScan to kinda get me over the hump and to kind of the next ages of ROI, it it's really exciting. But I just wanna add one other thing I just it's crossed my mind. It's it's the guys we're talking is, you know, we've been traditionally focused on a certain segment within or segments within retail that are suitable of self scan RFID count barcode counting. We've only been this in this now RFID space a short while. But we're already seeing interest from other verticals within retail -- Mhmm. -- that mentioned quick service restaurants. We would never have been in quick service restaurants -- Sure. Right. Now we have the ability to offer that vertical a solution which we didn't have before. So I think that we, you know, we're still at our early stages, but we're already seeing being able to broaden the market reach that Datascan as a company can provide a solution for. And if I'm looking at longer term for what we're looking to do as a company and grow and add value to the to the market, that is going to be another critical factor for us, I think. Yeah. That's an excellent point opens up a a world of opportunities in in other industries and other market segments. That's that's a that's a great point. Guys, any final thoughts, anything we haven't discussed yet that you think hey, people should know this about RFID. We've covered some ground, everything from implementation, to data scans approach, so so much that we've talked about here today, but her many final thoughts? It's a great technology. Absolutely wonderful. Retailers do need to implement this, and they need to find a simple primary use case to justify the ROI, once you do that, the sky is the limit. It's an absolutely wonderful technology, and we can help with that. Max, where should people go? If they wanna get in touch with data scan, talk to someone like yourself, an expert in RFID, what do people need to do? Yeah. Sure. So, I mean, first place is right over onto our website, right, data scan dot com, would be a great way to get a little bit more information around not only our traditional bar coding business, but also a new step into RFID. Obviously, feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn. Also, maybe they'll a little my email right here. Right? So and then would love to have have a conversation with you, wherever you are in your journey, write just getting started, maybe currently ongoing and would like another kind of opinion on kind of where to go next. We're here to help you update a scan. So It's that consultative approach like we've talked about. Adrian, final word? No. We're thrilled to be here to talk about our ID. I know we've had, you know, herbs been in the studio and a number of times, but to get an opportunity to sort of do the round table like this is really exciting. We're also going to be at NRF actually for the first time in our history, I think we're going to be in in January in New York and we're gonna be exhibiting our solutions at that show. So that's huge step forward for us as a company. We've never done that before, but RFID is sort of enabling us to take those steps to take data scan to the next level. So we're very excited about the the a, the launch and then there'd be the growth that we're seeing. Fantastic fantastic stuff. Everyone out there, again, datascan dot com is the website. If you would like to learn more. Also n r f twenty twenty three, you can find the data scan guys there and and go chat. Learn more about the solution there as well. Thank you everyone so much for being today for chatting here on this roundtable. Adrian Thomas, her billings and Max done. Guys, thank you so much. Thank you very much, John. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. And everyone out there thank you for tuning in to this live roundtable event brought to you by Datascan discussing everything in the world of RFID and It's been a pleasure having you along with this. Again, for more visit datascan dot com. Findepisodes of Herb hot takes. Keep in count more and more content that is out there from DataScan you can find there on the datascan website. And stay tuned. We'll be back soon with more updates. You heard the tease earlier from Herb, maybe some new product drops in twenty twenty three. So stay tuned for that But for this roundtable, again, thank you for joining us, and we'll see you again soon.