British Retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) is expanding its use of RFID technology to all clothing and home wares in its stores.
RFID partners since 2003, Marks & Spencer and Avery Dennison have worked together for 9 years to create specific RFID tags that are fully integrated into a complete range of labels and tickets. Prior to implementing RFID, M&S relied on optical scanners to track inventory – using barcodes to scan a maximum of 400-600 items per hour.
Using RFID in M&S stores or warehouses allows merchandise to be accurately scanned at up to 15,000 items per hour. Avery Dennison has supplied almost one billion RFID tags to M&S with no data loss or duplication. The tags can be read when an RFID scanner is up to a meter away, making the inventory tracking process faster and more efficient. Therefore, RFID technology from Avery Dennison allows M&S to replenish stock from the distribution center more quickly and accurately, making more garment sizes available to more customers.
In the future M&S plans to expand the use of RFID scanning throughout the supply chain to increase accuracy and speed of distribution. The project rollout will begin immediately in all departments in the course of 2013 and will be complete by Spring 2014.
