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R. MCCORMICK, RFID, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 702 S.W.8th St., Bentonville, AR 72716 Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is collaborating with our Top 100 suppliers, and 30 additional volunteer companies in a pilot to prepare for use of Radio Frequency Identification in distributing product from the suppliers' facility to the store. The collaborating group of suppliers includes 4 produce companies. Today we have a significant number of these suppliers already shipping tagged product in preparation for January, 2005. Additionally, we requested the next 200 suppliers to deploy product tagged at the case and pallet levels by January 2006. We believe RFID will offer many elements of the produce industry great benefits despite the awareness that much engineering yet to be done to reap the greater promise of the technology. The immediate advantages are: · EPC's do not need line of sight. · UPC bar code information is static. RFID tags are rewritable. · EPC's provide unique serial numbers. Theoretically, we will be able to identify which items have been received, stocked, scanned at the register, or those that are out of date. · With RFID, we can see which units of the same item (UPC) are scanned in our data tables allowing better inventory flow and in-stock at shelf level. Key areas of focus are shipping and receiving inventory visibility, receiving validation, auto identification, out-of-stock alerts, and perpetual inventory comparisons. Wal-Mart and the retail sector are utilizing passive tags supporting the GTIN format. We encourage interested parties to contact EPC Global for more information and membership – Kelly Shearer (609) 620-4671 / kshearer@epcglobalus.org. Wal-Mart's internal contacts in our Global Supply Chain are representatives Myron Burke (479) 277-7344.
Session 15, The dawn of RFID: What have we learned and where we are going?
2005 IFT Annual Meeting, July 15-20 - New Orleans, Louisiana |