The Retail RFID Roadmap

This webinar explores how retailers can build, scale, and expand an RFID program across their operations. Suzanne Gotfryd of Atlas RFID is joined by Stephen Wood of Atlas RFID and Patti Blessing of Zebra Technologies to break down the strategies, technologies, and business considerations behind a successful retail RFID deployment.

The discussion begins with four foundational areas every retailer should consider: tagging, hardware, software, and data. The speakers explain how RFID tags can be applied at the source or within the store, how handheld and fixed readers capture item-level information, how software turns RFID reads into actionable insights, and how retailers can determine which data should be visible to leadership, employees, customers, and suppliers.

The panel then walks through a five-step retail RFID roadmap:

1. Establish Inventory Visibility: Begin with tagged merchandise and handheld RFID readers to improve cycle-count speed, inventory accuracy, floor replenishment, and product availability.

2. Introduce Autonomous Reading: Add fixed or always-on readers at strategic locations to automatically track inventory movements between stockrooms, sales floors, fitting rooms, exits, and other zones.

3. Expand RFID Functionality: Use accurate item-level data to support faster checkout, mobile POS, self-checkout, returns verification, ship-from-store fulfillment, smart fitting rooms, and improved loss-prevention workflows.

4. Scale Across Store Locations: Standardize RFID processes across multiple stores to support BOPIS, store-to-store fulfillment, consistent merchandising, employee training, and more reliable inventory information across the entire retail network.

5. Expand Through the Supply Chain: Tag products earlier to improve manufacturing, receiving, shipment verification, warehouse inventory, supplier collaboration, and end-to-end visibility from the source to the consumer.

The speakers also discuss the importance of measuring RFID return on investment through sales lift, reduced out-of-stocks, lower carrying costs, improved employee efficiency, fewer markdowns, and a better customer experience.

During the Q&A, the panel addresses RFID applications beyond retail, including manufacturing spare parts, environments without Wi-Fi, RF interference, real-time item location, IT asset management, software integration, inventory discrepancies, and selecting the right readers and tags for different use cases.

The session emphasizes that RFID is no longer limited to large retailers. Businesses of nearly any size can start with a focused inventory use case and gradually expand as their needs, locations, and supply-chain complexity grow.