04. You can call me Fred

RFID reporting platform

The 2018 research paper ‘Measuring the Impact of RFID in Retailing’ jointly sponsored by GS1 and the ECR Community Shrinkage and On-shelf Availability Group, delivered a set of conclusions based upon review of RFID rollouts with 10 retail groups.

“Keeping it Simple: The final piece of advice many offered was to keep any planned RFID project simple – do not make it over complicated, and remember RFID merely provides data; if you do nothing with it then it is destined to fail.”

Working with the Fung Group we set about creating an RFID platform that would support their key drivers of providing highly accurate on shelf level availability, coupled with customer experience and integrate with security systems that were able to track item level alerts.

It was clear that in order to build a platform that worked for a diverse range of customer needs, we needed to not prescribe anything. We let the customers decide what happens, giving them the ability to get data out of the system and into their own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

We set out to design a rule-based engine which allowed customers to build their own scenarios.

Customers choose triggers, such as a point-of-sale scan, an alarm or an inventory scan and then filter the sites. They can then apply conditions and funnel the events to meet their own business rules. Once the conditions are met, the customer could build their own step including sending data to webhooks, SMS, e-mail or FTP allowing them to build their RFID solutions into their own systems seamlessly.

The result was a platform was endlessly scalable, robust and adaptable and most of all – simple.

For this reason, the platform became best known with the implementation team as ‘Fred’.   Somehow appropriate for this simple but ingenious solution.