Signal5 — How Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can make a difference in retailer’s Supply Chain

Tingyu Chang
Civic Analytics 2018
2 min readNov 13, 2018
RFID chips

Everyone must have encountered this annoying situation that things you want to buy are actually out of stock in the store. While at the same time, retailers are dealing with substantial amounts of surplus items. Of course, the imbalance between supply and demand is an inevitable issue in the retail industry, making use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology can better optimize its supply chain management.

First of all, RFID tags are able to provide accurate location and identity of attached items. In this way, it’s more efficient for sales to look for items for customers as well as manage the number of stocks in the store. Moreover, putting RFID tags on shelves especially in the grocery store can precisely monitor information like inventory amount as well as their expiration dates in order to guarantee customer’s experience. Furthermore, combine RFID with Intel-powered sensors, a huge amount of valuable data could be obtained and put into the analysis. This allows retailers to predict customers’ need and greatly improve inventory control.

Although some retailers in different areas like Levi’s and Walmart have started to adopt this technology, RFID is still not prevalent among retailers. Partly it’s because the cost at the very start is quite a lot and it actually takes time to see the improvement in practice.

Reference: https://veridiansol.com/rfid-in-the-supply-chain/

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