Walmart is the gorilla in the room when it comes to RFID mandates. They have had two waves of these mandates in the past few years. Others have followed suit, including Target, Lowes, Macy’s, and now Dicks Sporting Goods.
We hadn’t really thought about how many of our customers supply goods to sporting goods retailers such as Dicks, but it turns out we have many. That is our role in retail, we do not work with many retailers in their store operations, but we work with many of them in their warehouse operations, and with their suppliers.
The good news is that the Dicks RFID Playbook looks pretty similar to the Walmart one that we have come to know. Auburn University is the same source for approving tags and the tagging of products.
If you have spent any time in an apparel retailer like Under Armor or Lulu Lemon, you may have seen Zebra RFID equipment in action. These stores not only do inventory counts using RFID, but they do these counts many times per day, since they can inventory the entire store in just a few minutes. This helps them with their online sales, since customers will check to see if a product is in the store before driving over. This also helps monitor “shrink” in the store, a nice term for theft.
Where EMP helps is to guide the retail supplier through the hurdles of producing RFID tags, or labels, and getting them onto the products. Many times, these customers have never used RFID technology and don’t know where to start.
The good news is that we are an end-to-end source in these cases. RFID labels, RFID label printers, software to drive the printer, training, label format conversion, RFID readers to verify compliance, all from one source, the EMP Tech Group.
If you are looking for a technology partner that can help you with complete RFID solutions, contact EMP Tech Group to learn more.