Wal-Mart brands 250 million. garments with RFID

Previous Wal-Mart has been focusing on tagging pallets and cases but are now changing focus to tags on individual items in the categories that give them and their partners the greatest benefits and gains.

Wal-Mart is now working with its suppliers of menswear on marking the clothes with UHF-based RFID to track down the menswear. The marking is done with RFID tags based on EPCglobal's standards for UHF RFID inc. use of Electronic Product Codes (EPC).

According to Myron Burke who is leading the Wal-Mart's EPC program in the U.S., this work is part of the next step in Wal-Mart's EPC program. Wal-Mart will now focus on the types of products that have many stock-options (stock-keeping units (SKUs)) and therefore is a challenge to manage the stock at. "We work with the potential to improve our knowledge of our warehouse, and the exact number of goods. We work closely with our suppliers on strategic considerations for making this move to a part of our system, "says Myron Burke.
 
Wal-Mart has past the last eight months been working with their suppliers to make the suppliers capable of branding the products already in the construction phase. That way they get an opportunity to exploit the opportunities that RFID tag gives in their production. Unlike earlier when Wal-Mart simply demanded that their suppliers should RFID tag  the shipments from a given date, this time they have chosen to collaborate with suppliers to introduce EPC data into their warehouse management systems (WMS) and change their working procedures. It has happened to ensure that suppliers can exploit the benefits EPC tags gives them when they receive goods, which is now faster and more accurately and increases their deliveries also due to fewer mistakes in inventory management. Some suppliers have already started to tag jeans and other garments, the rest will do it at the end of the year.

Earlier this year Wal-Mart began to explain their suppliers of jeans and other garments that they had to tag these goods with EPC tags. Suppliers could freely choose whether they wanted to embed the EPC tags on labels or wrapping, only in every case there will be a visible mark with EPCglobal saying that the clothes are labeled with RFID. Wal-Mart's personnel do not remove the RFID tag when the product is sold, rather they expect that customers to cut of the "hang tags" and other brands before they use the clothes exactly as they do with other clothes without RFID tags. Wal-Mart has asked suppliers not to sew the RFID tag into the garment that way it will always be easly to remove by the customers, and for further more protection of the customers' privacy the RFID tag is not beeing read at checkout and will never be linked with personal information.

The clothes will be marked with RFID tag by the suppliers and then Wal-Mart will read the RFID tag EPC number when the goods are received at Wal-Mart's stock, moved into the store's sales area and in the sales area.

Myron Burke says that the new RFID system is designed not only to tell Wal-Mart which items are missing, must be refilled or reordered, but also to show when some goods are placed on the wrong shelves or disappeared. Burke refuses to talk about specific benefits of this system but says that the pilot study they have carried out indicates that the use of EPC tags improve their stock accuracy and availability of products on the shelves in the store. Studies done by the University of Arkansas' RFID Research Center indicates that the use of RFID can improve the precision on stock  from 65 percent to over 95 percent.

The new RFID initiatives will not require RFID tags on all clothing at Wal-Mart right now, instead it is the meaning that Wal-Mart "only" will brand items that have certain characteristics,  and not seasonel products which are only in store for a short period of time. At first they will focus on products like jeans that is always available in retail stores and requires several choices by customers like. brand, type, color and sizes.

Myron Burke estimates that in this area only the total number of subjects will be around. 250 million. per. year. He also expects that similar actions will show in other similar areas in stores.

Concerned consumer organizations now fear that their privacy is compromised, they fear that criminals in the future buy RFID equipment and will be driving around and scan people's garbage for RFID chips to find out if there is something valuable to steal - creative thought but hardly very likely.

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