Edson Perin
Lojas Renner, considered the largest fashion retailer in Brazil, had its radio frequency identification (RFID) use case analyzed and voted on by a group of independent experts and became a finalist for the international RFID Journal Awards 2022, the Oscar of RFID technology in the business world. The winners of the award, distributed in several categories, will be announced during the RFID Journal LIVE!, world’s largest event for RFID and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies applied in businesses.
Renner adopted the set of solutions from Sensormatic by Johnson Controls combined with the updating of its systems to improve the management of its inventories, improving the accuracy and replacement of products, with a focus on delighting its customers.
The objective of implementing RFID was to increase inventory visibility, ensuring that the company has a single inventory aligned with its omnichannel (or, in English, omnichannel) strategy. In this way, Renner manages to improve its visibility of products throughout the chain, thus making all the stock accessible to its customers on the various platforms.
For this project, Renner had a multidisciplinary team made up of several Company employees, led by the Risk Director, Alexandre Ribeiro. The project covered several areas within the company, so it made sense to have a diverse group of key people in Store operations, Logistics, Information Technology (IT), Quality, Supply Chain Management, Products and several other business teams and Support.
This team began researching RFID technology in retail and other industries and looked for potential implementation partners for the project. “Renner sought out many companies for the project and kept in mind the need for global operations, innovation and experience in other projects”, says Ribeiro. Thus, Sensormatic was selected for the RFID deployment project, as was the TrueVUE software.
“The RFID project is structuring, and required the involvement, cooperation and joint action of different areas of the Company. The project had CEO Fabio Faccio as a sponsor, and the contribution of several areas, such as Operations, Product and Information Technology, which played an important role in the implementation of the project”, emphasizes Ribeiro.
The RFID project focused on several benefits, with emphasis on improving the accuracy of inventories, availability, productivity and improving management, bringing several gains to the operation, always with a focus on customer delight. The possibility of carrying out regular and fast inventories enables the optimization of the entire process and quick decision-making, through data management.
Renner also observed important benefits in operational efficiency through the management of information generated by RFID, with accurate visibility of the products in its various sales channels. The implementation provided a robust improvement in the correct availability of products, bringing several benefits to the company, its customers and suppliers.
Renner opted for mobile RFID equipment from Blue Bird, that is, the EF 500r collector and the EF 900 RFID reader. These are the equipment that Renner uses in most of its operations, whether in receiving, inventories, transfers, and the multipurpose manual equipment, which meets the entire RFID operation in stores, including the mobile selling process. For the point of sale (POS), fixed RFID readers from Acura are provided by Sensormatic.
Renner labels are supplied by Sensormatic, with inlay by Avery Dennison Smartrac. There are sewn, adhesive labels and also special labels for metals, liquid products, small products and fine products.
Based on several studies, visits and benchmarking, it was possible to identify that most companies used RFID technology only for inventory management, and those that used RFID as an alarm solution did so with a dual rigid label technology, where AM technology was used to manage the alarm, but on a tag with both technologies incorporated.
Renner, on the other hand, intended to use a single, single-chip tag with both functions, for inventory and alarm management, which was the main premise of the project required by the company and one of greatest innovation on a large scale worldwide. Thus, the antennas and other RFID customizations were developed by Sensormatic together with Renner to meet this need, which until then did not exist in the market.
“With this implementation, Renner, together with Sensormatic, became the pioneer in the development and implementation of this innovation in RFID technology, managing to incorporate different functionalities in a single tag, bringing several benefits to the company, our customers and suppliers”, says Ribeiro.
