IndiaRetailBiz

The US$81 billion, European retail giant, Germany-based, Metro Group, has announced going into full-fledged RFID deployment. “The efficiencies the chain saw in trials was too compelling to not deploy,” said a senior executive justifying the move.

“We are moving RFID out of the innovation labs and into working retail stores,” said Dr. Gerd Wolfram, Managing Director (IT), Metro will initially deploy RFID at about 180 locations, comprising 60 Metro Cash & Carry stores, 100 Real stores, 9 distribution centers and some wholesale locations.

This is a remarkable initiative as most retailers across the world are still grappling with the feasibility issues, including reliability, economy and security, concerning the use of RFID technology. Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, is a strong votary of the technology, which has the potential of revolutionising retail business. RFID in retail will be the biggest innovation after the introduction of bar code technology. Apart from boosting supply chain efficiencies, RFID will help in keeping close tabs on inventories.

The Metro chain has asked its suppliers to ship all RFID pallets fully RFID tagged by October 1, 2007.

Metro’s initiative could be called as the largest production rollout of RFID in retail in Europe.

While, Metro has always been leading in its wireless strategy, its efforts, like most others, were so far limited to trials only.

The U.S. counterparts have found low read accuracy rates as one of the biggest hurdles in full-scale deployment RFID in their stores. However, according to Metro, “It’s not a problem at all on the pallet level as the pallet-level read rates were “about 100 percent. It’s only slightly weaker on the case level, where the read-rate accuracy is at around 95 to 100%.”

“Our business people benefit even from 95 percent, as against the process we have today, with people running around the pallet and counting every case on the pallet manually” said Wolfarm, while explaining the benefits of RFID for his organisation.

While, Metro will be using RFID starter packs from Intermec, Tag Acquisition Processor products will be procured from Reva Systems.