Infotech Lead America: Marks & Spencer, a U.K.-based apparel and food retailer, has expanded its use of Avery Dennison’s RFID technology to all clothing and home wares in its stores.
This roll out will take place throughout all departments in the course of 2013 and will be complete by Spring 2014.
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. RFID 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.
“Having accurate stock information is a driver for our whole business, especially when it comes to multi-channel. The RFID partnership with Avery Dennison is allowing us to replenish stock from the distribution center more accurately, making more garment sizes available to more customers and continuing to prove its value over and over again,” said Kim Phillips, head of packaging, Marks & Spencer.
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.
“We are pleased to have partnered with M&S over the last 9 years as an industry leader in the activation of RFID by proving out their business case and delivering on the operational efficiencies promised by the technology. As one of the UK’s biggest retailers, M&S is focused on providing exceptional customer experience and RFID enables that experience by ensuring inventory accuracy from the distribution center to the store floor, providing shoppers with consistent and accurate product availability in-store and online,” said Shawn Neville, president, retail branding and information solutions, Avery Dennison.
Marks & Spencer is of the UK’s leading retailers, with over 21 million people visiting its stores each week. Offering stylish, high quality, great value clothing and home products, and outstanding quality foods, responsibly sourced from around 2,000 suppliers globally, M&S has over 700 UK stores in the UK.
