Host Mike Graen concludes his 2023 OSA "State of the Industry" in this Part 2 episode. He addresses key questions such as:

⚖️Benefits of RFID and its place in retail

🏬 Retailers that are using RFID

🛍️ Leveraging the store pick-up process

Greetings, this is Mike Grain. Welcome to

another edition of the Walton Supply Chain Center, focusing on

on shelf availability. Today, I get the chance to kind of share

my ideas and my thoughts on the state of the industry as it

relates to on shelf availability. I've got a couple

of clips from this year's particular podcast. But really

it's focusing on what are the different people processes and

technology to be able to look at on shelf availability and make

improvements. Let's get started. So you heard Bill Hardgrave talk

about that Dr. Hardgrave says you really need to know what you

have and where it's located. And I've used this big idea theme

for a lot. And it's pretty intuitive to understand, but

what would the world look like if you could literally lift the

cover off a store, look down and know exactly what you had and

exactly where it was located at a relatively real time basis?

And that's where that's the challenge that retailers have,

how do I develop systems to be able to do that. And there's two

ways to think about it. Most retailers think about this as in

stock versus on shelf. In stock means, I have it on hand, and

that number is bigger than what I think I'll sell. The problem

with that is both of those numbers tend to be inaccurate.

What I have on hand, we already talked about being 50 to 60%.

daily demand is what I think I'll sell and that's a sales

forecast. And that's probably not a lot better. Maybe it's

75-80%. But there are two numbers that are together not

very accurate, but you're using those to calculate what the in

stock is. What you want to be measuring is what's actually

available for customer purchase. And that's what we're going to

spend some time talking about, what is it exactly that the

customer see? I would argue that a lot of retailers don't think

about on shelf availability or just availability, and measuring

that like other KPIs. Okay. So things like what was my on shelf

availability number today? Well, today, if you look at this

chart, it's probably in the 95% range. Well, is that good or

bad? Well, depends on what your goal is. If your goal is 95,

you're doing pretty well. How am I doing versus last year? So it

allows you to measure these particular important factors to

customers around whether the product is available to do that

now? I think everybody would say, Yeah, that's great, I'd

love to be able to do that I don't know how to do that we're

gonna do is going to walk you through some some new thinking

about how, because some approaches that would

potentially do that. So let's talk through these, one of them

is an algorithm. An algorithm I'm going to give you at the at

the end of this, I'm going to kind of give you a couple of

companies. I'm not endorsing the companies, but I think they're

very good companies that could potentially be helped us to help

you if you're in the CPG world, or if you're a retailer. This

one is an algorithm this, this works really well on high

velocity items. You see here, I've kind of chugging along at

15 and 16, as well, but I'm selling a bunch and all sudden

that number goes to zero. Well, I'm not sure what the onhand of

that item is, it's pretty sure that products no longer

available to a customer. I can say that with a fair degree of

certainty. And what I do then is driving alert either to the

store associate to look at that item, or to potentially a third

party broker or merchandiser like Acosta or Andersen, folks

like that, to go address that issue, fix it, find out that as

a problem, get it back on the shelf. And then we call what

this the rest of this is we call recovered sales. If you've been

able to find an issue, fix the issue, get it back on the shelf,

then you watch to see and obviously the orange item, got

put back on the shelf because it good went back to the normal

rhythm of selling the product, the blue one or black one who

can't tell what color it is probably still not on the shelf

for customer Regardless, this particular technology just to

frame out where it works well, it works really well with high

velocity items, paper towels, laundry detergent, and a fast

moving consumer goods worked really, really well. It's

accurate, it's timely, there's some really good things you can

literally if you get the data fast enough, you can run through

this and literally within the same day half day, get the data

processor, generate the alerts, fix the alerts and get things

back on the shelf. So certainly not real time, but very, very,

very fast. And I think it's an important tool for people to

look at to be able to solve this. What are some of the down

things this downsides? Well, number one, it struggles with

things that don't move very high. So if I've got an item

that says, I'm selling water to or muds, well am I out of stock

or not on the shelf? Or is it just not moving enough to

generate that kind of sales. So lower velocity skews, it can be

trained, it's getting better and better. These algorithms are

getting better, better all the time, but they still struggle

with The lack of data and being able to learn it to make sure

you're delivering alerts that people can go work that aren't

false and false alerts. The other thing is this is really

problematic in things like apparel, because apparel is, I

may sell one shoe, one sock, a bra etc. And I may not sell any

for the next three weeks. It also requires another downside

is that requires a lot of data probably a year to two years of

by store by day by item kind of data to prove develop the the

algorithm to be able to say when things we expected to be sale,

and whether there's a drift from that alerted. And the only other

thing that it doesn't do very well is it doesn't measure the

on hand accuracy, it can tell you if it's on the shelf fairly

accurately, but it struggles with with the ability to be able

to see if it's on shelf or not. The second option is store

audits. And we got some great companies that we'll talk about

here a little bit. One of them is the field agent folks who've

been doing this for a long time. This is actually sending

crowdsource people into stores, taking pictures based upon, you

know, a customer not being just a customer, but they're actually

providing value back to the retailer and the CPG community.

It's a pretty cost effective model, it's very fast, I've seen

a credible increases of the accuracy, images and the data

that comes out of that. And so and I think some of the

companies have come up with you know, models that that that are

more self service models, which I think are a great addition to

this capability. They are tend to be kind of project by

project. So it's not a systemic thing like an algorithm, or some

other options we're going to talk about they're typically

project by project, they're not census they're typically sample.

So to be able to measure on shelf availability of a retail

chain, across the time period, you'd have to use more of a

sampling techniques. So it's not that's not census data, that

that's maybe not to be a bad thing. But that is the truth.

And the other thing is unless you actually have these in

stores or in store resources, doing counting of things, you

can you can't see the on hand accuracy, you can just see if

the product is there or not. Okay, here's one that continues

to grow. And we did a podcast on the major players in the

industry, probably about six months ago, it'll be on the on

shelf availability website. These are shelf scanning robots,

there are several of them that I'll mention here in a little

bit. You know, they basically create a realogram. For every

store for every, for every category for every day, they can

usually run two or three times a day, by the time they rent, scan

the whole store, go back and recharge, and then then go scan

again. They are very accurate, they're timely, they can also do

multiple functions, some functions actually do a run on

the row on the floor, and clean the floors. Some of them inspect

the floors like the Badger one that that's here actually

inspects the floor, I bet it goes back to redock. To that it

does a jail cell scan. So it could be doing other things in

the store. Some of them have been equipped with RFID readers

and temperature sensor so it can actually measure other things

other than just the computer vision portion it does here.

Alright, what's some of the downsides? The downsides is a

couple, it's certainly more expensive than a lot of the

other resources, it's a capital investment or a some kind of a

investment that the retailer has to make a Secondly, one of the

challenges these is and we'll we'll get this with fixed

cameras here in a second, you can only see really the first

the first facing you can't see what's behind the CANS that were

just there, you can see the first one, you don't know if the

other ones are the same product or different products, etc. It

certainly struggles with trying to scan things like apparel that

that all look the same, or cosmetics that are extremely

small, and they look like they are actually the same kind of

packaging, and the computer vision and artificial

intelligence kind of struggles with that. And then again, last

thing is you know, on had accuracy, it's not going to be

able to measure that. Couple more RFID. We're gonna go more

into this in a minute. But certainly RFID has its place in

retail. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But

it's it is a way of being able to use an RFID tag, and actually

without line of sight being able to count exactly what you have.

And for the most part kind of where it's located in the store.

It's really good for on hand accuracy, backroom picking bogus

asset protection kind of purposes. It does on hand

accuracy very, very well. It doesn't do as well tell the unit

exactly where the product is. Because it reads so well it can

read 10 to 15 to 20 feet, you don't know if it's right word in

front of you, or if it's on the shelf, on the opposite side of

where he's wanting right now could be reading tags there. So

it doesn't do as good a job was as the store audit shelf

scanning robots when it comes to the location of the project, at

least when you do the handheld portion of this. Man I'm not

really monitoring questions. So if you can interrupt me at any

point in time in question that needs to come through, I would

appreciate it.

Here's an interesting one, this is one that's starting to grow a

little bit, some retailers, for their bogus activities are

having their own associates, Walmart, for example, have their

own associates doing a line picking and putting product and

customers, you know, back of their cars, delivery to their

home was at a great service. Tremendous, you know, I think I

think they started down that path prior to COVID. But COVID,

kind of as Dr. Hardgrave mentioned it really made that a

must have, and I think it's still applied today. But one of

the things this one happens to be a company that that actually

does this as a service. And they literally shop for a customer.

Now, when she's buying the things off the customer list, it

certainly gives them the ability to be able to say here's all the

stuff, they also know what items were on that list that when they

went to buy them, they could not find that's called his nail

pick. And that's what it says on the left hand side here. So some

of the some of the benefits to this solution, obviously, it is

very customer facing. And this is a real customer shopping for

a real customer. That is as best as a way of measuring whether

was on the shelf or not assuming they did a good job of trying to

find the item, it is as real time out of stock as it can get

because you're getting that day, that kind of real time. The

downside is it doesn't do every product every day, unless you

order in a grocery store has 60,000 items, I would imagine

that all not all 60,000 items are being picked every single

day. So you don't get data every day unless it's picked. And then

connecting to this data and then driving it back through your

store operations is sometimes challenging because of its real

time nature. And by the way, by the time the customer comes in

to buy something, or a, a shopper comes in to buy

something for on behalf of another customer. And it's out

of stock, it's already too late. You've already disappointed

somebody somebody asked either make a substitution or something

like that. So those are some of the downsides of that. Last one

but not least is fixed cameras, and this is certainly one that

is an option as well. They are real time they're looking at the

shelf across the aisle 24 hours, 7 days a week or as long as the

retailer's open, they're able to tell you immediately, unlike the

shelf scanning robot that only may walk by that shelf two or

three times a day. This is measuring on shelf availability

real time of what's across the aisle, it could it could

actually detect both out of stock and low stock as well. It

is more expensive than these other options. And it's

certainly a challenge because every time you redo a modular or

do store layout kind of changes, it becomes a challenge because

you got to move cameras and things like that as well. But I

think these are the kinds of things that are going to be

future considerations should be taken into account that they'll

get around figuring out how to make that happen. Last but not

least, the fixed cameras can't count either. They could see

what's on the first the first facing, but they can't see

what's behind that. So that's a lot of detail about how the real

question that people are going to say as well, which one should

I choose? And I'd love to just say, Well, here's the one you

should choose. Unfortunately, it depends. And we're going to talk

a little bit about that later. For a retail apparel player,

like a Macy's or or Dick's Sporting Goods at Nordstrom,

they've already made the decision that RFID is going to

be their way forward. Other particular retailers were that

were like a Walmart or Kroger etc. Where you may have some

gentlemen, if merchandise and some grocery and some

consumables and some fresh, you're gonna have to have

multiple sensors, you're gonna have to have computer vision,

you're gonna have to have RFID, you may have to have 2d barcode

methodology to be able to read and some things like that. So so

not to get into the watch for its every every one of them. But

for sure, it is it is absolutely important. To know, you're going

to have to, you're going to have to figure out how to operate in

an environment where you have multiple sensors that are

delivering the data to you. Okay. So I'm going to briefly go

over these, these are very quick, high level. But I want to

give you a list of folks that I have been known I've worked with

over the last year or so. And again, this is not an

endorsement, I'm not telling you to do this. They've not provided

any funding that we're endorsing this video, that is absolutely

not the case. But what we have done is worked with them enough

to know they have something that it may be worthwhile for you to

consider. You'd have to use that use your own, use your own

consideration. So I'm doing everything I can to be walking

very carefully here because I really liked these subs, but I'm

not trying to endorse them or anything like that. All right,

enough of that. So first and foremost, the couple of

companies that do algorithms retail inside, they've been

doing it for years, years and years and years. Keen & Core has

a or service offering, I believe now that's mostly outside the

United States, but they have another set of options. as well.

And then I think, you know, obviously there's sales and

marketing companies out there such as Acasta, Anderson, uh

Premium is part of a of Acasta. Now, we've got people like

Crossmark, we've got folks in like advanced sales and

marketing. All good companies all do a really good job of

competing in the space to be the arms and legs in the store to

react to these issues that you see in store and get product

back on the shelf. Excuse me, a couple of folks said that I want

to make sure that you're aware of and we've done podcasts with

these companies as well, again, the on shelf availability, go

back and take a look at that one that is putting together as part

of conversations on retail. But both of these companies don't

feel days and tracks do a really good job of collecting in store

conditions. They have a different model one's

crowdsourcing and one's not. But the bottom line is they do both

very fantastic job. And I would encourage you to listen to the

podcasts that we had on them to talk about the services they

offer. We had a very interesting podcast about six months ago

with all of the leading shell scanning robot manufacturers,

Brain Corp, Badgers, Simbi, Zippity. A lot of really

interesting it was it was interesting, because I had all

the CEOs on the on the podcast of these various companies. And

what they were doing is talking about industry challenges, not

so much what their solution did versus the other ones, but

instead how this particular solution fit, where it sit,

where it didn't sit, where it made sense, etc. Definitely

worth exploring and taking a look at that. RFID we've had,

we've had several folks we've had Eric and the folks on from

Zebra, Paul Boyan, etc. Terry Durham on from Zebra talking

about the Zebra solution, Dean Frew, from SML, who's who, who

provides both tags as well as software solutions. Bill Tony,

from Avery Dennison, who is probably the leading RFID tag

supplier in the world. And they offer offer software solutions

as well, etc. So there's a few names there. And then we've got

a couple with focal systems at SES Omega tag, if you're

interested in exploring, we've had both of them on a podcast as

well, talking about, again, the value of how fixed cameras work

versus potentially other solutions that are out there.

Okay. Last but not least, we did have a podcast with these folks

as well, they may not have a solution by itself, a standalone

solution. But one of the things that the robots, and frankly,

the the field agent and tracks resources, as well as the fixed

cameras all have in common is they need to be able to use both

computer vision and artificial intelligence to be able to take

that realogram or that picture that electronic picture no

matter how was captured and turn it into insights that say, I can

see that product is different than what I was expecting. Or I

can see a label without a product. And all that AI and

computer vision and this particular technology gets

better and better and better every single year when it first

came out, we really struggled with the reliability of etc. but

it continues to get better. And I keep a close eye on it because

I think the computer vision or CV and artificial intelligence,

these four companies are doing a great job with it. And I think

there's others that are starting up to try and jump into that

space as well. And I think it's a pretty important space to be

What's it well, let's double decker double dip a little bit

in.

into the holes in the RFID. And I think that's an important

thing that we want to kind of talk through as we kind of wrap

up. Because RFID is basically exploding in the industry right

now from a retail perspective. We're seeing it in retailers

that want to know what they have and where it's located. From a

retail on hand accuracy picking asset protection. I'll walk you

through some of those in a little bit. We're seeing a

tremendous increase in the interest of RFID for food.

Again, we have a podcast about their about RFID for food. We

talked with both Justin Patton and some of the folks who are

kind of working in the ad matters and Anderson from Avery

Dennison talking about leveraging RFID for date, age

product and how do you make sure you have fresh products? How do

you make sure you're you're replenishing the inventory. So

from the time it gets picked to the from the field until it

actually gets into the store. You're doing the first in first

out if things are that are starting to get marked down for

a quick sale, you know what those items are etc. RFID can

play a role with that. And obviously it's outside of retail

but RFID is really taking off in the aerospace industry with

every time you fly on Delta your RFID your bag is our RFID tag so

it gets on the right airline. They do an RFID scan of The

entire plane between between trips to make sure all the

oxygen masks and seatbelts and all that kind of stuff that's

all using RFID technology. But for retail, how many do I have,

I mean, obviously a, a sporting goods type store here, I have no

idea how many shirts I've got, how many socks I've got, etc.

RFID is playing an important role. You've seen it work before

you saw it in the video. But basically, there's a tag,

there's a reader, that tag is energized and woken up and then

sends it to some software that says I've just counted 12 pairs

of jeans. And by the way, the on hand you had was 14. So we're

going to change the on hand down to 12 to reflect what you've got

here. Mike price asked a question while back which is,

well, well, what is the relationship of shrink to on

hand accuracy and this is kind of where I thought I would

double click on that a little bit, Mike, I think the

relationship is, if on he had accuracy was always 100% which

says you always got what you paid for from the from the

source who's sending it to you if whether it's a DC or wire

supplier or whatever. And and that everybody always paid for

things that are leading the store. And there were no

administrative markup mark down because of things like pricing,

etc, you wouldn't have to have RFID, your you would always be

very, very, very accurate. The problem is you have to use RFID.

Because you don't always get what you pay for from a

receiving standpoint. ORC are organized retail crime as on the

outbreak we seen Walmart and Target and Home Depot all

declare to the industry, this is a industry problem, we've got to

figure out how to get this figured out. We have people like

Lowe's, Home Improvement that are literally putting RFID tags

in power drills. So if you don't run your power drill through the

register, and you just pick it up at the shelf and walk out,

that product will not work. It's called Project unlock. If you're

interested in that, it's pretty fascinating technology. There's

a lot of implications to doing something like that. But

obviously shrink, theft, both organized retail crime, crimes

of opportunity, frankly, store associates, all that is kind of

playing into a really difficult situation. And I think RFID

while it may not be the solving problem, it lets you know what

left the store that did not get paid for I think that's one of

the definite use cases for it. Retailer adoption of RFID

continues on the rise. You've probably heard recently that

both Dick's Sporting Goods and Nordstroms are now joining it.

And I've actually got a slide here that we saw at RFID

journal, just looking at the implementations, the amount of

RFID expansion going on, you can see a pretty big jump of from

2018 to 2023. In terms of the amount of tags, this is from,

obviously from the Auburn RFID lab, so it's continuing to grow.

Some of these are not just retail, obviously, people like

UPS are actively engaging with UPS with RFID for packet

tracking, but certainly the market is going to continue to

grow in terms of needs for that. One of the things that I that I

wanted to kind of cover real quickly, whether it's an on

shelf availability, if it's a potential putting a robot in or

a fixed camera, or whatever you know my learnings at RFID have,

I think are laid out in terms of a number of different projects

like that. Number one, it has to be business driven. And there's

a lot of folks out there that are saying, Yeah, I've got a

cool tool comes out, check out the cool tool. It's critically

important that you understand what is the business problem I

have first and then apply the right tools to it. I took you

through the four or five or six options for collecting on shelf

availability for a reason. Because it's not a it's not a

payroll or you got to be really clear about what you're trying

to get done. Real Clear on the categories you're trying to get

it done for and for that, for that particular matter. You got

to be able to deal with the business problem is Henry saying

what would you tell the retailer to do to partner with their

vendors to change the game and measure measurable impact with

OSA? Well, Henry, I think it's a great question. I think the I

think the suppliers do have a role there. Part of it's part of

it is I believe strongly in sharing this on shelf

availability, both with the retailer and with the actual CPG

company. This information about what is available and where is

it located. How many units are in a case? What are the

opportunities, whether it's missing labels, etc. How do we

leverage the resources within the CPG community to help assist

the relay retailer case packaging? There's a ton of

things that could potentially be used. But the first is, to me is

just a recognized or retailer that it's important to them to a

CPG it's important to them. And to ask that basic question, how

can we collaborate together to make sure we're driving on shelf

availability across the box and clearly that's that's happening

today in terms of, you know, things being stolen, and well,

it's just lock them up behind cabinets. That'll keep it from

stealing. Yeah, but you definitely create a really

negative consumers customer service when you do that. So

that would be my thing, which is got to be business driven.

Secondly, it's got to be top leadership. Most of these

projects that I've seen be successful, have been

successful, because you have a strategic leader at the top of

the company that is pushing and says, We've got to fundamentally

change, and we're going to have changed. It's not a technology

product. This is a this is a change management project, which

is going to require people processes and technology. And

frankly, the technology is the last piece that people should be

thinking about. What are the best success stories just for

you guys to know, we had a podcast a while back probably

about four months ago. Again, it'll be on the on shelf

availability site. But we talked a little bit to some several

experts on on shelf availability, specifically bio

line pickup at store, Walmart has dough has probably gone

through five iterations of executing RFID, or retail. And

it never stuck. And by the way, I've been involved with each one

of them. They've all failed for a different reason. Sometimes it

wasn't right. Sometimes they were trying to do the wrong

thing with the technology. Sometimes it was, you know,

legal issues outside of the industry that were causing

problems. But the bottom line is it finally got into a point

where we had a CEO, a leader who wanted to be able to deliver the

product in the store, and deliver it make it available to

customers for online picking. That was Deanah Baker, who was

the former SVP at Walmart. She was she was adamant that she

wants to have her associates picking products, both grocery

products and apparel products to take care of customer needs. So

let's hear a little bit from her. Again, this podcast is

available but but I think it'd be really interesting to hear

kind of her strategic focus of why she tried decided to

implement RFID at Walmart.

I want to be able to leverage the store pickup

process within what I saw as developing in stores, through

grocery pickup for apparel, I'd be able to really leverage that

inventory also knew that resource investment would only

occur if there was trust in our inventory accuracy. No one was

going to spend precious labor to chase down phantom inventory to

then just ultimately disappoint customers. And then when you

said that the entire apparel industry, not just Walmart had

an accuracy rate of about 50%. That was shocking to me. You

know, it wasn't just my problem was an industry problem. One of

the first steps was in understanding how RFID actually

worked, and not what I remembered from some attempts in

the past and overcoming that, I think was a huge step change for

our organization, we communicate with all of our supplier

partners, right and really rallied them and it took a full

year to flush through the inventory to be all RFID tagged.

The truth is that none of this really would have come to

fruition. Had we not had advocates and champions within

the various disciplines of the box to really help us bring RFID

to a to Walmart and our dream a reality.

All right, so let me let me close with a couple of

kind of final thoughts here. The first is RFID has been talked

about is primarily on hand accuracy. And it clearly has a

huge play of getting that on hand accuracy. It also has an

they'll go back to Mike Prices question around loss prevention

or asset protection. Imagine having the ability to be able to

not only have product in your store, but if it leaves the

store through a register and leaves the store, you would know

it and if it gets picked up and walks out the store, you would

know it as well. So you would actually know whether that and

went through a register, or whether it just left the store.

Macy's has done probably the best job of any retailer I've

seen today, leveraging RFID and actually prosecuting ORC crime

rings of product that they know that they bought in for the

store. It was inside of the Macy's store. It left the Macy's

store without being paid for at a register and literally be able

to go out and capture that unique serialized data or see

serialized item and be able to report back to federal

authorities that that product was stolen and shutting down

those crime rates. I think it's an enormous opportunity of

leveraging RFID for asset protection purposes. Elimination

of food waste I already mentioned that one I think food

food traceability recalls all that kind of stuff. Incredibly

important because it is important to know every dollar

that I have a UPC and the quantity which is the

traditional way we do retail, you know, I've got a UPC on this

particular bottle and I've got 10 of them. Well with RFID I

literally get a unique serial number of each one of the

tenants kind of like having a VIN number in your car, I have a

VIN number for every one of these water bottles. And so I

can tell you the state and status of every one of those.

And we'll come back to that and hit that here in a second. But I

think that's going to be the future of retail is getting down

to a itemize. Item serialized level for being able to track

things in the retail supply chain. Okay. There's a bunch of

and I've maxed out all this because retailers have asked me,

What's it worth? Well, you have to make some assumptions about

what these are worth. But to build in there, the

infrastructure needed to do this, you have to move away from

a handheld one, which is what most retailers do today, and

start to look at other infrastructure like fixed

infrastructure, robots, cameras, things like that, that are going

to collect the data you need. And I'm not going to go through

this whole graph. But you obviously see, you can do a

limited set of the things we're wanting, they're incredibly

important and very valuable. But as you start to look at things

like location, accuracy, and shrink up reporting, and asset

tracking, etc, you have to invest in more than just a

handheld infrastructure. And that's part of the cost of doing

business at retail today. So I'm going to go back and summarize,

you know, kind of what I said at the beginning of this thing,

which is, you got to know what you have, and you got to know

where it's located to be a disruptor. Two more things that

we're going to focus on for for kind of the time going forward.

Number one, just continue to tell a story that there are

there are tools out there that you can use, you got to know

what your industry problem is, you got to know what the right

tool is. I'm a big woodworker I've got a great big shop, I

would never try and cut a board with a hammer, I could probably

cut a board with a hammer, but it would take a lot of time, it

wouldn't be very pretty. And it would be messy, right? A saws a

better tool. And that's kind of the way I think about the retail

supply chain. There, you got to figure out what exactly you're

trying to get done and make sure you choose the right tool for

it. So like I think about that. But but a summary that I want to

make here. Number one is, we're going to have to figure out how

to live in a multi sensor solution. It's not computer

vision, or AI or RFID and 2d barcode or did you mark and

whatever. It's a lot of them working together. And

collectively, every single item has a way of uniquely knowing

where it is, and where it's located. The industry struggles

with us today, if there's no solution, you can buy out of the

box to be able to do this, you got to figure out what you need

for your business, and then apply it to it. The second one

that's very important, we already mentioned this on RFID.

But there's a new initiative that you knew it's relatively,

it didn't work at all for a while they've just sort of

launched it this year, which is called Sunset 2027. It's part of

the GS one initiative. What it means is every single point of

sale register will need to be able to scan a 2d barcode or a

QR code, in addition to just a single UPC. What does that mean?

That means back to this bottle, I know this bottle and I know

where it's located. And this is different than the bottle I've

got right next to it that looks the same. Okay, well, what would

I do that Mike because you start thinking about things like

televisions in the store, I may have three televisions in the

store. But one of the televisions is on the on the

back wall showing customers how they work. One of the

televisions just came in as a return from a customer. And it's

back in claims. So I may have three particular televisions,

but I really only have one available for sale because one's

on the wall and one's back in claims. With this serialized

methodology, you could actually start to assign state and status

to specific items. And that doesn't, that's not just RFID.

That's the same was with with a box of tide or a bottle of tide,

or a paper towel etc, we can start to look at attributes with

items beyond just what the UPC is. And I think this is a huge

migration opportunity that we got to work forward. Including

you that is the whole sharing data with the various supply

chain folks, you know, we've got different ways of doing it. Gs

one has EPCIS specific retailers like WalMart have retail link

and things like that. We've got ways of sharing data, there's

not a consistent way to do it across the industry. And I think

that's one of the challenges as well. So lots of fairly good

things that are going to continue on this platform. We're

going to continue to have conversations with subject

matter experts of this to go a lot more deeper. But I did want

to mention Matt, just as in closing on my part anyway, to

see if we have any other additional questions out there,

or if there's any quick closing comments that you want to make.

Mike just looks at another question from Mike Price

based on your current knowledge. Do you believe OSA is going to

improve or decline in the next 12 months?

That's a great question. My hope is Mike that

it gets better. My hope is that people will continue to realize

that this is a Inc credibly important KPI that they have to

look at, and that they're going to put the right resources

against doing it. I'm not advocating being 100%, OSA, I

don't think that's financially smart to figure out how to be

100%, you wouldn't want to pay for that. But clearly, customers

have more choices than ever. So I think by default, people are

going to get better at doing this, whether that's reducing

the number of skews I have, and going back to the old home or

holding capacity on the shelf, or some of the technologies we

talked about here. I'm certainly hopeful. And that's the reason

that I'm spending time in this area, that it's going to get

better. But it's not a it's not, it's a change management

project, it's something you're going to have to decide at a

senior level to focus on, you got to measure it, you got to

figure out how you're going to improve it where you're not

meeting goals and treat it like any other KPI running a retail

or a CPG company. So from my perspective, it will. But I

guess at the end of the day, it's a report card on how well

we're kind of educating the the industry. I think people kind of

walk away from this stuff, because it's really hard. But

but it's something that's obviously very, very important.

And obviously we've seen before years and years of examples

where retailers choose to not innovate and continue to focus

on meeting customer needs. And by the way, they're not around

anymore. They've got they've gone by the wayside. So I think

the ones that are really focusing on this and doing the

right thing, both omni channel and brick and mortar and

figuring out how to make that product available. They're

focusing on the right level. The other ones may not be around

long term.

Great stuff, Mike. Appreciate everything that you

have done to develop this, this series in this group. I

appreciate the folks that have registered to attend appreciate

our sponsors. We will have the video version of this edited

over the weekend and up on the on shelf availability.com

website for everyone to to review, again, share with your

teams. And we'll look forward to seeing everyone back here again

for our next conversation on retail. Thank you so much. Have

a great weekend. Thank

you. Bye bye. Well, that wraps up our discussion on the state

of the industry for on shelf availability. Join us next time

we're going to be joining with Justin patent and Matthew

Russell from the Auburn University RFID lab, talking

about the status of RFID in the retail industry in food and

potentially we'll get a little bit into aviation. Not exactly

focusing on on shelf availability, but just different

ways that that technology is helping serve as those

industries