Join Mike Graen as he finishes his conversation with Elena Ver Planck from the Nedap company including best practices for RFID implementaton, leveraging RFID for theft mitigation, and the value RFID can provide to a company.

Greetings. My name is Mike Graen. Welcome to

another University of Arkansas Supply Chain Management Research

Council. Today we are joined by Elena from Nedap. She is a

Operations Manager Director inside of Nedap. She spends a

lot of time working with retailers on RFID

implementations and is really successful at trying to explain

some of the best practices to make RFID work inside a retail

organization. Let's join our podcast in progress.

You are 100 percent right. Yep.

So tagging - operational benefit would be

potentially at the DC no lower than the DC because you're

right, once it gets into the store, it becomes a treasure

hunter, what's tagged and what's not tagged and cetera, upstream

to the supplier is probably the best, the best best approach.

Talk to us about operationally collecting that RFID information

at store level best practices that you would in for a store

associate that's using their RFID. And let's just say

specifically, your system, what are the some of the best

practices make sure that they are scanning correctly, scanning

accurately accounting for everything? Talk to us about

some of the operational best practices there.

In the store once the solution is deployed?

So? Yeah, so um, firstly, we like to think that ideally, it's

pretty, I like to almost call it like plug and play, like, it's

pretty, like I said, our, our interface is, we like to think

of it as pretty simple, that you can kind of pick it up, and it's

kind of like your iPhone, right? No directions needed, you just

intuitively know what you're supposed to do with it. So like

to say that, so it's more around the setup of your store. So

understanding, you know, same as any RFID, right, you want to,

you want to limit your amount of metal, you want to limit your

amount of exposure to you know, the the water bottle thing,

where they're like, we're keep scanning as it lands on a water

bottle, move on. It's not gonna happen, right? So we like to

think that it's pretty easy to do, and that it's a matter of

each retailer, is what works for you, we like to say you should

count every week, at least once a week that you should do the

physical going around the store and counting your items.

So let me let me stop you. That's a great point.

Once a week, some retailers do it every day. Some retailers do

it once a month. Now why did you say best practices probably once

a week?

So. So that's it will be consistent, you've

got it, you've got a consistent what came in what left? You can

you can track things easier. I think when you get longer than

once a week, it's, it's too far, it's too far to to turn around

and go, Wait, we've got all these discrepancies it becomes.

So you want to minimize, you want this to be easy on your

sales associates. And, you know, the reality behind a lot of

fashion retailers is that the sales associates are, you know,

sometimes they're seasonal employees are not going to be

there for a whole long time. Sometimes, you know, they're,

you know, their schedules change. So you got different

people coming and going and doing this. But if you if you

don't make it a consistent this is what we do every Tuesday

morning, every Tuesday morning, we count the store and not just

that one store, right you make it sort of district wide or

region wide. And that makes it easier on the whole process the

store for counting the store managers for approval. So

whether or not you allow like the store manager to approve

differences and that kind of stuff. And then as it goes

through, you're able to see the challenge the the changes week

by week, so much easier to identify anything that's gone

wrong in a week than to turn around and have to say it's been

weeks and then when you get stores or retailers where you

know some stores are counting some stores aren't counting some

stores are not approving like that's when you're just you know

you're you're half using the tool right and the the folks who

I think really love the tool, love the data that they collect,

get the best results understand what they've got, have the

product in the store for the for the customers when they come in.

Those are the people who have just kind of made this almost

like brushing your teeth right like Get up brush teeth and move

on with your day. Every Tuesday you come in your store, boom,

you're done.

Yep, there's a there's a term that Auburn

called PI Drift, is that as you started at 50, or 60%, that

wasn't acceptable. You wanted to get up to at least 95%. Plus,

you could offer that product to a customer and potentially even

expose that on hand online, etc. So I do an RFID scan, I get up

to 95%. The minute I stopped scanning, my PII starts to

degrade back down again, the question is, how long do I want

to wait? Exactly. And my sense is about a week, you'll, you'll

actually drop below 90%, for some items really, really,

really quickly. So I don't know if it's every day that you do a

scan. And if you're gonna do that, you might want to think

about six infrastructure. But, you know, once a month, or once

every three months, etc, is not necessarily going to be enough.

There's different by category. But the question is, if you

really want if your goal is inventory accuracy of 95%,

you're probably going to have to least do that minimum of once a

week, right?

Yeah, I agree.

Well, here's some other things that I've seen.

I'll just see how much of this makes you cringe? Well, I'm

gonna go ahead and do my RFID scan when I'm receiving trucks

with new freight and customers are shopping stuff. That's the

best time to be able to collect this data. Would you agree with

that or disagree? Well, we haven't we haven't rehearsed

this. But agree or disagree. Those are that's a great time to

do it.

Yeah, I think you should do it. You know,

when? Yeah, when it's crazy and busy. No, absolutely. I totally

disagree. Totally disagree? No.

I got another one for you. This one was hilarious.

Before you do an RFID scan, look on the floor of everywhere.

There's an RFID tag that has fallen off a garment, and pick

up those tags and throw them into the nearest garbage can

before you do a scanned. Oh, what do you thoughts on that

one? By the way, the garbage can is not metal, so you're most

likely going to read?

Oh, so you're so what's the why? Why did you

bother doing that? Kind of a waste of time. I think you kind

of want to know where where's the garment this was attached to

or the item, I can see if you're going to pick it up and look for

it or you know, decide that you've been robbed. But exactly,

maybe, maybe your cause is to call the authorities. Like I

think we were just like we were just had but

I did have a retailer that literally said if

you find the tags on the floor, throw them into the nearest

garbage can before you do our RFID scan. And I said, Excuse

me, that's a plastic garbage can. I'm gonna read every one of

those tags and assume that does the product, right? Yeah, you

better get them out of the building.

Right? They're still there, or get yourself one

of those little metal tins, put them right inside the little

tag. Exactly.

Exactly. So all right, so that does for

scanning. So So for what are the other best practices that you

have seen or not. So best practices that you would like to

highlight, because from an operational standpoint, you've

probably seen here are the things that are really, really

good things to do from best practices, and here are the

things that are definitely watch out any other that you want to

share with us.

Yeah, um, so I think that, you know,

truthfully, in the, you know, four years that I've been doing

this, we've had way more success, actually, with the

retailers and the implementations that we've done,

than we've had failure. So really, and truly, I think that

when an organization decides to, to go ahead and implement, I

think, the best part, I think the things that make it

successful are leadership by in number one, having those

stakeholders completely involved, and making sure that

they are communicating with the rest of the organization,

because I think one of the pitfalls that I can remember one

retailer was that they kind of thought that it was really just

store ops that, you know, that was kind of involved. Or maybe

it was asset protection, like one of the group's I don't

remember, but it was really like their thing, and it wasn't

anybody else's thing. And the problem with that is, it's so

wrong. It's so wrong. You're making a major change to your

entire ecosystem, and it's going to touch everything, the way the

way your auditors do things, right. So even just thinking

about, Oh, okay, I guess we need to inform them of all of these

changes and stuff. So making sure that you have a really

clear roadmap and that you've really thought about, okay, this

is what we're going to do, and this is how we're going to

communicate this, communicate all the changes. I also think

having one central person, really that is Usually, it is a

project manager on the retailer side, but somebody who is just

the person that communicates constantly with our team and

staying in communications, having those weekly catch up

having those, you know, bug fix meetings, like what's going on

what happened with this, and having that person understand

what's going on, because that person will be your your

champion, your cheerleader, and the person who can communicate

what other people are seeing. And it makes it less hectic than

30 or 40 people involved. So I think that the both of those

things are really important, I think the communication piece

is, is huge. And then the other. The other thing that I see is,

and again, I'm not in sales, so if it's selling things was

critical, my family would be homeless and starving, because

I'm not doing it, I can't do it. So, sales goes out, and sales

sells the dream. And I love that. And then we are like the

group that can you know, sprinkle the magic and make the

dream happen. But make the dream happen in a logical way that

makes sense, right, as you go through as opposed to wanting

everything. And I do think that there are some, and I think it's

sometimes just really more individuals that are like, well,

we want to do this, and we want to do that. And when can we do

this? And what about this? And can we talk about that, and it's

like, Please stop, please stop, let's just let's just focus on

step number one, your your, we want you to get there, I want

you to have that dream, I absolutely do. But I also want

you to have it in a way that, that you'll that you will

appreciate it, I don't want you I don't want to throw everything

at you. And then it becomes so much more that your organization

is just overwhelmed. And that's just as Uncle work like Uncle

enough. And then you're angry, right, you're not having a good

experience. And like I said earlier, it's it's, it's a major

change for an organization. So you want people to feel like,

this makes sense. This is happening in an orderly fashion,

we can take this on, we can execute it, we have the folks

devoted to it, as opposed to just like, let's get it all and

let's have this group do this, and this group do that. And, and

suddenly, it's just like it's craziness. And honestly, it's

it's just not how we work. So, so yeah.

You're you're central person is a really good

model, I actually talked about having it kind of be trained the

trainer as well train the people. So that so that so that

individual or individuals who are doing that work, just a just

a philosophical question. Do you take somebody who really

understands RFID? Kind of the bits and bytes and RFID? How it

works? And have them do that? Or do you take somebody who really

understands store operation, understands the pain points and

teach them the technology, which is the better approach?

So I actually think the better approach, I

think, RFID I came to Nedap; I literally remember being like,

what what are the letters EAS like what does that for? I don't

know what you're talking about? You started talking about GS1,

we have a GS1 guy here on the office, he's a guru. I don't

pretend to know what he knows, but he will teach me so. But I

have my skills. And that's the same way I feel about this. So I

think the better approach, and the customers that I've seen the

most success are the people who understand the business. I mean,

we have Nedap is filled with just really smart, really

excited people within their space. So if you want to talk

GS1, I got a guy for you, you want to talk labels, I got a

girl for you, like whatever that is, I can do that. But if he I

don't know your business, but you know your business. So if

you can say to me, or to one of my amazing project managers or

customer success manager, if you can say that won't work for us,

because because this is how we do it. This is how we this is

how we want the experience to be for our our customer that is

different from retailer to retailer, and you tell me that

and then I will tell you what you can do with the technology

and then I can teach you we can teach you so much better. I

can't teach you how to run your business and I'm never going to

pretend to so what we try to do is just try to explain to you

this is how it will work and then you can say to me, okay,

well you know our store is just, you know it works this sway, and

we got product moving upstairs and downstairs and Delta. Okay.

Okay, so let's go through that together. So I like the approach

of, of the person who understands the business.

I was hoping we could have a debate on that one

because I was hoping you'd pick the other side. But I agree with

you before I. And I remember this vividly. And I won't tell

you what retailer is because it's embarrassing, but I was on

the RFID team, and I was very understanding of the operations

of it. But I created this 10 Step list of things they had to

do to be able to deliver a successful scan that associates

did I just kind of give it away, but it's telling you what is

associate the associates did step one, number one, it failed.

But they didn't look, they went to step two, four, or five, all

the way through 10 and said it didn't work. And that is when I

said I gotta stop teaching this as a technologist, I have to

teach this as a business person. And we started doing side by

side videos. This is what a inventory accuracy inventory

looks like before, this is what it looks like with RFID. This

one takes five hours, this one takes five seconds. This one is

65% accurate. This is not. Now do you see why we're doing this?

Oh, now we do it now show me how to do that. So it was just a

completely different approach. And I'm not a marketing

salesperson, either. But I got to feel like I gotta get into

their head to go. I don't want to make their life easier,

rather than here's the 40 steps that I've got to go through and

do something right.

Yeah, we one of the things that we we love to

do, we highly encourage retailers to do is. So my team,

you know, I think we've all become so conditioned now to be

able to do everything virtually, which is great. And as a lot of

pluses. And that's fantastic. But there is something to be

said for that face to face, allowing our project managers to

meet your team in a store to go through it with you to do the

train the trainer in a store with your team, and really

understanding because a lot of times when we get in there, even

the things that we've sort of seen and heard and understand or

think we understand, and then they come back and they're like,

oh my gosh, no, you know what, that was never gonna work. Like,

no, we need to change that. So and then together, we're going

to partner with you. And, um, you know, that's like just

another like, Nate app thing is that, and that's what kind of

makes us different is we look at the relationship like it's a

partnership. We're here to be partners with you and help you

so we don't just say, Here you go. Good luck, God bless, have

fun. We're like, Okay, this is the way it should work. This is

what we see. But you tell us if this works for you, you tell us

that there's something we can do to help you along the way. So

yeah, that's awesome.

That's awesome. Well, just a quick reminder, for

anybody who's on the actually on the, the session, we've got a

bunch of folks on there already. If you do have any questions, go

ahead and send them to me via chat. I've got a couple more

questions. And then we'll, we'll turn it over to any questions

you guys have raised. And as Matt mentioned, we will end the

official podcast and if there's additional questions you would

like to ask Elena directly off the off camera off webcast, we

will certainly take advantage of that as well. You said a three

letter word before. And you just kind of threw that out there

EAS Yes. Yeah. And this has become a

passion area for a lot of people in this space. Because RFID is

all about we gotta get, we got to know what we have at a high

degree of accuracy. We've got to know where it's located. That's

what it does every single day to a lot of retailers. There's some

retailers that are starting to think about RFID as a electronic

article surveillance or EAS kind of theft detection. I know

you're pretty passionate about that walk us through kind of

what you see the future being about potentially leveraging

RFID for theft mitigation or shrink measurements kinds of

things.

Oh, yeah, you're right. So EAS is like my,

like very close to my heart. Because when I started here, I

started on the EAS side. And I remember going over to the

Netherlands being like, I'm sorry, I don't I don't know what

you guys are talking about. These gates that go beep beep

beep and I'm like, "Oh, I know what those are." I get that.

Okay, so that's what we're talking about. And it's funny

because that was only four years ago. And nobody really talked

much about the RFID piece with the EAS piece and now it is it's

kind of all people are talking about it is it is the thing for

the next, you know, five years, I would say. So, basically

you've got, you've got these gates, right, you're you've got

this, you know, maybe it's an overhead whatever Originally

like thought, Okay, this is going to stop that. And there's

sort of a, you know, a conversation to be had of does

it right? Is it a deterrent? It's probably a visual deterrent

to your 16 year old kid, right. But to your, you know,

organized, you know, theft person, they're like it,

whatever. And most retailers tell people tell those sales

associates like, Don't go chasing them down, they go out

the door, it goes beep, beep, doesn't matter. Let it go. Thank

God, right. But okay, if those are going off, and we can

collect the data about what's leaving the store? Maybe we

should, what should we do with that? What can we do with that,

and there's just a plethora of use cases for that. So anything

from, you know, sweet Harding at the register. So three or four

things get rung up. But then one gets returned, and then

everything walked out the door, or however it is that they're

basically, you know, scanning that. And you can see what left

the store at the item level detail, as opposed to just

knowing like, okay, it went off, it beeped things left. But we

don't really know what now we know what, and we can we can do

so much more with that data. And again, like goes back to was it

sold here? So I think there's, there's an enormous potential

for the loss prevention industry of how to use that beyond RFID

data. So I think that's, it's coming. It's very, very close

here at Nedap. So I'm very excited. And I do think that

that's the next piece of the puzzle.

Yeah, I do I do as well. Because again, the

electronic article surveillance does a least a audible visual

alarm, etc. But you have no idea what left the store at all

right? You have no no clue versus, hey, I noticed when I

left the store, I can do two things. Number one, I can

measure what left the store, I could probably go back to video

camera and potentially put a post case together. But thirdly,

and most importantly, I know which items I need to now

readjust my on hand, so I don't disappoint the honest customer

who's trying to buy that product. And it's not available,

because it says I have five and there's none available in the

store.

100%. Yeah, when you're, when you're back to

that use case where you're, you know, those things are leaving

the store, and you have no idea, you know, until three days

later, right? So, ya know.

So is there any best practices? Or is anything that

you can do? Because Because certainly knowing what left the

store without being paid for, or what you paid for, that you

didn't receive from the supplier, your DC, et cetera,

and be able to measure that real time as a huge value versus the

once a year inventory we do, you know, what we typically do in

industry. The question becomes is can you leverage RFID to

actually stop theft? And I'd love to hear your answer as EAS

expert. EAS tells you as left as building or something left the

building. RFID even tells you here's exactly what left the

building. Is there any way to leverage RFID as part of a steps

mitigation strategy so it doesn't leave the building? Just

a curious question.

So I would challenge the word "expert".

Definitely challenge the word expert. I am by no means an

expert, but I can get you on if you need one. So, you know, it's

probably for people smarter than I'm sure there is. I'm sure

there is right. I'm sure that as as we use the technology as we

think about it, and I'm sure there's a tremendous amount of

people out there in loss prevention that are like, oh,

yeah, I can I can come up with a whole bunch of ways. That's not

really something I think about, but I'm sure there is.

Yeah. Well, it's it's interested in me. And I'm

sure there's a bunch of folks out there who have already

thought about this as well, because I don't consider myself

an expert as well. But but if I actually made an investment in a

software platform like yours and a fixed infrastructure that's

reading things all the time. If I know that razor blades are $20

a package I know most customers buy maybe one every once in a

while by two but mostly one or two followed by see eight just

left that particular area of the store. I might be able to ask

some questions at the door, right? Just say, yeah, yeah. I

think there's Yeah, the simple people are buying 10 My guess is

they're not for using it for personal use. Let's just put it

that way.

You know, there is there is a use case that we

are testing out with a particular retailer surrounding

organized crime or organized theft, about the idea of

multiples, right? Like that entire stack of jeans, nobody's

buying that entire rack, right? And just put it in and it's out

the door. But if you know that it left, if you get an alert,

and you, you know that that left you then in certain instances in

certain retailers, they know that that's happening, it's

probably going to happen at the store down the street or the

store, you know, three towns over and then you can alert them

that like, hey, we were just hit, potentially, you might be

hit. So there's there are there's there's an it's funny,

because I'm sitting here going oh, yeah, I remember that

conversation, because not in all of them. But yeah, there's

there's definitely, it's the data, right, it just goes back

to data is changing. And if you've got the data, then you

might as well use it. And like you said if you're if your

company is investing in this type of technology, use it and

and, you know, use it to its full potential. Because there's

a lot that we can do with it a lot that we never could do with

it. I think like how much my husband would have loved this in

the store. Right? It just would have made life so much easier.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Have you by chance heard of - I'm going to promote

a company here because they've been pretty public about it -

have you heard of what Lowe's is doing with a project called

Project Unlock?

I have not what are they doing?

So hear this one out, this is fascinating. This

was specifically and again, this is they've been very public

about it. So hopefully, I'm not taking anything out of context.

But the idea was, they had a lot of kind of major theft of power

tools, power tools, or probably 100 bucks for a drill, right. So

what they would literally do is put and you can kind of follow

this, I put an RFID tag inside the power drill, that drill is

turned off, okay, unless it gets read by an RFID reader. On the

outside of the box is a to b 2d barcode, which is basically the

serial number of that tag. Okay. So if they go to a register,

they scan that tag, they give them their 100 bucks for the

product. And RFID reader turns that product on so it will work.

If they just grab a bunch of those drills and run out the

store. They got a bunch of drills, but they don't work,

because it hasn't been enabled. That's really cool project.

Isn't that brilliant?

Yes. And that is we literally owned a hardware

store and a real. Yeah, that's what we that's what my husband

owned, he owned a hardware store, in [?] Square and and

yeah, and the power tools. And like all of the electronics like

that was the stuff that, you know, walked out of the store,

and it was a small source of locking everything up was

impossible. So sure, he's like, Oh, my God, that would have been

amazing. Because, you know, yeah, and the margins or the

margins on that stuff are they're not great. I mean,

they're not huge. So you know, you lose a couple that sucks.

And if you're the person that just stole them all,

and you try and resell them, and they don't work, thank you very

much. That, you know, again, you reward that bad behavior by

nobody's gonna buy it from me because they don't work.

What an amazing gotcha though, right? I like

that actually.

You think about televisions and appliances.

Basically, anything that has either an AC or DC source, you

could actually enable through that. And now the idea of

coordinating across maybe we have so much trouble, just keep

trying to get people's but RFID tags on the boxes, the idea of

trying to coordinate that, but to me, that's a breakthrough

kind of thing. If you can literally say unless you pay for

it. I'd love to do with your lipstick example, unless you pay

for it. If it leaves the store, it doesn't work. You put it on

turns your legs blue or something like that. I mean, I

don't know how you do that. But -

It's, yeah, I mean, and that's probably like

the biggest challenge with some of the amazing like use cases

for all this stuff is okay. In concept. This is amazing. But

then you have to put it into practice. And we're not quite

there with a lot of this. But I do think that, you know, it's

getting there. I mean, you know, look 10 years ago, like people

were still you know, physical inventories and counting things

one by one and so you know, it will change it will get better,

but take some time. So.

It is a fun, it is a fun time to be part of retail.

It is it is a fun time to be involved with some of these

innovative ways. I mean, just being able to know what you have

and where it's located a high degree of low level so you can

have enough challenge and have enough confidence to expose

those on hands to customers. And what you just mentioned supply

chain. I may not have any of these pens right now. But I know

that a truck just left my DC it'll be here for six hours. I

can go ahead and expose those The pins that are going to be on

that truck because I have confidence there on that truck.

So it unlocks a lot of thought and not to use the project

unlocked. But to me, asset protection is the next big

opportunity. Asset protection and supply chain are the two

biggest opportunities. Now that you've invested all that time

and put RFID tagging for inventory accuracy, we can now

do other things with it, which is pretty exciting. It is. I'll

call them out. And I'm thinking everybody's already heard this.

But Joe Cole from Macy's is definitely leading the edge and

leading the inventory opportunity from an AP

standpoint of trying to figure out how to leverage his data for

asset protection purposes. So I know he gets a lot of requests

for come and tell us how you're doing this. But to me, that's,

that's the breakthrough opportunity. For sure.

I agree. 100%. Yeah.

I gotta tell you, this has been a great

conversation. I love to I'd love to hear about how, how the store

that is going to be implemented in the future who were your

husband bought the lipstick, and because I'll bet you a year from

now they're using RFID for lipsticks because -

Ted is hoping that they are.

You keep saying, you keep saying you're not a

salesperson, but you're certainly a salesperson, because

you're passionate about this topic. So I want to thank you

very much for your time you don't you've done a great job

representing the data in the industry. And, and thanks for

all the practical tips because I we've never gotten into this

specific kind of here's what works and here's some best

practices, etc. I think he walked us through several from

where you tag it to highest wanded that whole idea of a

central person who really understands the business and

helps to implement it. We call them kind of store champion kind

of idea. I think those are all exceptional opportunities for

any retailer out there who's doing this. Oh, well. Any other

closing comments? Any anything that I should have asked you

that? I probably didn't?

Um, I don't think so. We covered a lot.

Thank you for, you know, for the opportunity. And thank you for

making this very easy, because I was a little nervous. So I

appreciate it.

You did a great job. Thank you very much. Have a

great weekend. Yeah.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Thanks for joining us for this discussion

with need app. Hope you enjoyed both part one and part two,

where we talk about best practices on RFID

implementations. Join us next time as we get together with the

folks from SCS E-Magnatag and talk about on shelf availability

and specifically computer vision to measure on shelf availability