Matthew Russell, Managing Director of Retail at Auburn University's RFID Lab, sat down with host Mike Graen to discuss the evolving trends in RFID technology for 2024. He highlighted the lab's work with major retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Nike including:

• Inventory accuracy and supplier compliance
• Importance of selecting the right RFID tags and inlays
• Shift from handheld readers to fixed infrastructure for real-time tracking
• Future use cases include expiration management and location positioning

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presented by all access retail.com Welcome to

Conversations on retail. Join Mike Green as he sits down with

Matthew Russell, Managing Director of retail at Auburn

University's RFID lab, to discuss 2024 retail trends and

how RFID technology is shaping the future. Let's get started.

So Matthew, we had an opportunity, I think, last

year in 2023 to talk about RFID at retail, and at the time, it

seemed like momentum was building in the industry for

RFID. So before we get into all that, we really want to just use

this as an opportunity to find out what's new, what's hot, what

are the trends, etc. But before we do that, there may be a whole

bunch of people out there who does don't know who you are,

who's that? Matthew Russell guy, and anything that you want to

share with us about you before we launch into this. So tell us

a little bit about yourself.

Sure. Matthew Russell, I am the director of

retail at the Auburn University RFID lab. I've been there for

about seven years now. Started out as a student, and then kind

of worked through most of college, and then stuck around

after college, and now, and my current role, helps support,

manage our retail projects, make sure that we have the students

to support those, work with the different student teams, and

then our full time staff as well. And yeah, we the lab has

been around since 2005 around then started at University of

Arkansas, and then we came down to Auburn in 2014 we work with

all sorts of different industries, so primarily

focusing on resale, but also working in the food, space,

aviation industry, manufacturing, all sorts of

different industries that use RFID there. So it's an exciting

place to be. I think, like you said, there's a lot of stuff

going on right now with RFID and a lot of different retailers

looking at it. So it's definitely a hot spot to be in,

awesome.

So you've been there for seven years, but a lot of

that was as a student. I'm assuming that was part time.

When did you actually become full time after college, after

you graduated, when did you start full time at the lab?

Yes, it would have been three and a half years

ago. Now, three

Has it been three and a half years already, oh, my

Times flying by. Yeah, or, I guess, a little

God,

over three years ago. So then I left for about a year, year and

a half, and then came back about a year ago, and have been there

since then, in my current role.

Well, so it started. It started in at the University

of Arkansas in 2005 and I've been part of the of the lab from

the very, very beginning, but you've always really been

focused on retail. And it seems over the course of the last

several years, you started spinning up new verticals. So I

believe you have a vertical with, you know, aviation, and

you've got quick serve restaurants, and you've got the

whole package distribution with, you know, people like UPS,

FedEx, etc, your specific role are you working on those? Are

you primarily focusing on just the retail aspect of it?

I am primarily retail. So I get asked a lot of

questions about those, and I'm like, honestly, I don't have the

full view of what's going on, but definitely a lot of interest

in food. We know that aviation is using RFID for all sorts of

things, but my primary focus is retail, and honestly, that's

where we see a lot of movement with RFID in general, so there's

plenty of work there for me to focus on. Okay, so,

So walk me through, and we don't want you to share

anything that's confidential, but you've got a number of very,

very strategic and important retailers that are part of the

Auburn RFID Lab, I'm assuming that a lot of them use your

services. And I'm going to ask you in a second what some of

those services are, because I think it'd be helpful just to

kind of lay that, lay that out. But who are some of the

retailers that you're working with?

Yeah, so one of the largest ones is, is Walmart?

The lab sort of started alongside Walmart on their RFID

journey almost 20 years ago now, and we've worked with them

pretty much ever since then. But some of the other ones that we

work with are Kroger, Dick's Sporting Goods, Nike, PVH,

Kohl's. So there's a whole list of retailers. Walmart-Canada and

Walmart-Mexico. It's, it's, I mean, honestly, it's hard to go

to a retailer these days that doesn't use RFID. So we've,

we're pretty much in contact with with most of the major

retailers, and then work directly on projects with with

plenty of those too.

So and again, nothing confidential. What if

they use your services for? So what is if I was a brand new

retailer? I'm starting my own shoe store business, and I've

decided that RFID is going to be a really key enabler for me. And

I call you up and go, How can you help me be successful and

implement RFID for my particular retail store? What are some of

the kinds of things that you guys do to provide guidance to

some of these retailers.

Yes, there's two major factors that need to

be considered when, when implementing RFID. The first is,

what readers and tags are you going to use? So what's that

hardware solution going to be? And then how are you actually

going to get your suppliers to tag that product so that you can

scan it and make use of that data. So we help support from

from both of those ends, and that's sort of where we start

with with most of the retailers that we engage with. So we'll

help guide them and sort of tell them which RFID tags they should

be using for their product categories, both from a

performance and a quality standpoint. So that's what the

ARC Program at the lab was really stood up to do, was to

ensure that of the 10s of billions of RFID tags that we

have flowing through the supply chain, they're going to meet the

performance requirements and meet those quality requirements.

And then the other part of that is, once we give them guidance

on the RFID tags, they've chosen their reader or their hardware

solution, for those, we need to actually make sure that their

suppliers can execute on tagging that that product. And that's

really one of the biggest challenges. And you know, it's

you ask any retailer that's doing this now, and they'll say

it's a constant battle to ensure that their suppliers are tagging

that product and tagging it correctly. So we have what's

called the Alec program at the lab, and that's a submission

program where, if I'm a retailer, I would ask my

suppliers to submit their RFID solution to the Alec program,

and then we at the lab either approve that or we fail it and

tell them, hey, maybe you didn't tag this in the right place, or

maybe you didn't use the right kind of tag. And that's really

at the end of the day. It's to give the retailers confidence

that their suppliers are executing correctly and when

that product gets to the store that it's going to be able to

scan with RFID and they can use it to update their inventory. So

those are some of the major ways that we help support RFID

programs, but also help with some data, reporting, tracking

the saturation of suppliers, really guiding them, creating

playbooks that are step by step, guidelines for the suppliers to

to take, to tag their product. So sometimes it can vary a

little bit, but it's it's really, like I said, focusing on

the inlays and focusing on supplier compliance and how it

can do that the best way possible, got it.

And so this arc, the arc process that you just talked

about, you know, from the outside, a tag is a tag, is a

tag, is a tag. Why do I need all of these various tags and in

specs, etc? Can I just put an RFID tag on anything and make it

work? Or is it more complicated than that?

It's, I wish it was that easy. It is more

complicated than that. There's there's a lot of physics

challenges with radio frequencies in general, and from

a product or a packaging standpoint, things like metal,

foil, liquid based, water based liquids, those can all interfere

with RFID or with RF waves, and this can impact the reads that

we would get when scanning and there's going to be different

types of of inlays that respond differently to products and

methods of merchandising. And so at the lab, that's that's part

of what we do, is look at product groupings. Look at their

dielectric properties of the material causing that product.

Consider how it's going to be merchandised. You know, how do

they display that in store? And taking all that into

consideration, we create what's called a spec, and that's that

list of inlays that, you know, for that specific type of

product or packaging in that given scenario, those are the

inlays that will work and meet those performance requirements.

And there's some products that they may have metal or they may

have completely foil packaging. And we say there may not be a

feasible way to tag this in an effective manner or in a way

that. You know, it's going to be acceptable by the retailer. So

there's always challenges there, and there's creative solutions

that we have to use to work around that.

Yeah, for the audience, I'll give you just a

classic example. An RFID tag that you would put on a pair of

socks is going to be a lot different than an RFID tag

you're going to put on an automotive tire, because the

tires, you got metal, you got rubber, all kind of stuff.

They're going to be bigger. They're going to be better

performing. You probably don't need all of that for a pair of

socks, because that's going to be probably your easiest read.

So I wish it was that easy too. Now, actually, the ARC program

and synthel have done a really good job of trying to collapse

some of these arc specs so we don't have so many out there, I

think that's probably subtle to most people, but I think that

will help simplify. So instead of 20 different arc specs,

there's a handful that people kind of go to. Is that, is that

part of the strategy you guys have? Yeah, and

that's what, that's what we're working

towards now, is looking at how we can consolidate to fewer

specs, because doesn't really help anybody if we have 5 or 10,

15, 20 different specs floating out there, it makes it easier

when we say, Hey, if you're apparel, you can use this one

spec for any type of product, and that's going to make it

easier for the industry to produce inlays to meet those

requirements and really focus their efforts, but also from the

suppliers perspective, they're looking at one list for their

products that's much easier than having to manage multiple

different ways.

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so let's switch over to business cases a little bit.

I think the business cases and some of the tech options to

read, it will go together, but just for background, 2005 when

the lab started, the whole idea was, put a tag on a case or a

pallet, add a manufacturing plant and see it track through

the supply chain all the way to the store. And I think what we

all realize is, yeah, that technically worked, but we

already had pretty good solutions that did that anyway.

At the case level, it's when they got opened up at the store

and the items became, you know, out in the open, that we lost

stuff, right? So there's this whole big other push in kind of

2008 2010, to go back to the basics at the item level, in the

store level, and use RFID to correct on hands right. That's

the basic driving factor. The question becomes, it's now 2024

and obviously, people are probably moving beyond that,

basics, kind of functionality. What are some of the big driving

factors you're hearing from retailers? And again, don't be

specific. I don't want to call anybody out of proprietary stuff

they're working on. But what are those other use cases that

people are going you know, if we've already got this stuff

tagged and we're using it to inventory accuracy, here's the

other things that we could be doing with it, what are you

hearing?

Yeah, so if, if we think about a store like you

said, the primary focus has been inventory accuracy, so making

sure that what's in that store is is corrected, but that

inventory accuracy continues to degrade, and then you constantly

have to lift it back up. And then, you know, it's, it's this

endless cycle of correcting your inventory. So we can think of

the store kind of like a black box where there's inputs from

farther upstream in the supply chain. And then there's stuff

that's going out of that store, whether being sold or, you know,

that after whatever it is. So I think now you know, they've

retailers in general, have looked at what's in the store

with inventory accuracy, and now this, the efforts, or the

interest, is really looking at what's farther upstream and

what's downstream as that product leaves the store. And

how can they gain better visibility into both of those

processes from a supply chain, like an internal standpoint, but

also on, like a downstream customer standpoint, like, are

there people bypassing the exits and walking out of the store

with products RFID might, might give visibility into that or

same as we look further upstream towards receiving in stores or

in distribution centers, is the product that's actually coming

into that store accurate? Does it match what you know, the

either the retailer's distribution center, or that

supplier is saying that they're sending that's where a lot of

the the focus is now. And I think that makes sense, because

there's, there's a clear business value in that, where if

you're not receiving what you're expecting, you're having to deal

with the the impact of that. Or if someone is taking product out

of your store and they're not paying for it, you're having to

deal with the financial implications of that. So I think

those are two big areas, and then there's additional use

cases that we see RFID having the possibility to be leveraged

for, like maybe expiration management or location

positioning, and stores with some different infrastructure

outside of just handheld readers. So there's some like

that. That may not be the primary business driver to

implement RFID, but maybe an add on or a bonus if you already

have RFID tags in store. So there's, there's a lot, I think

retailers are looking at a lot, but there's a few, you know,

clear ones, that sort of we see across the board.

So restating that I'm going to use RFID and

probably a handheld to once a week or once a month, or

whatever the frequency is, handheld scan everything to

correct my inventory, the obvious question is, well, why

do I have to re correct my inventory. If I receive

everything I paid for and everything gets paid for that

leaves the store, I should never have to correct any inventory.

But the reality is, what we're doing is using RFID to figure

out, why is my PI degrading, right? And let's just talk

through that. I'm assuming that that requires a different set of

infrastructure from a retailer, because if I can one the back

room and one the sales floor, that's easy. If I want to have a

real time read of everything I'm receiving, a real time read of

everything that's leaving. I'm assuming fixed infrastructure is

starting to become popular within the industry. Is that a

fair assessment?

It that's that is a fair assessment. We get

asked about fixed infrastructure all the time, yeah, where you

know, it's like, how do we use this, not, if not throughout the

whole store, just at some points that might make sense, like at

exits or at receiving. And I think you're, you're definitely

right. That's where a lot of the interest is, because we want to

correct inventory, but, but really, we want to get to the

root cause of why that inventory is bad and solve the problem,

not just put a band aid over it. Got it. So

did the retailers that made investment in a

handheld solution are now moving to more of a fixed

infrastructure. I call it control points. What did I

receive? What transition to the sales floor, what left the

store, whether it got paid for or not, either through a

customer exit or through a buy online pickup in the store, or

whatever. But I know stuff is in the box, and I know if it's in

the back room or sales floor. Is that the kind of infrastructure

that we use to do that? And if so, do the handhelds then go to

the wands then go away. Or do we use use them for other purposes

inside the box,

I think the fixed infrastructure, like the

control points, probably are the way to do that. You know? I

think it makes sense, because you may not want to make the

investment to cover the entire store with with fixed readers

and read everything all at once, but it might make sense to have

visibility into those control points or access points, you

know, whether in the back room or front of the store, and then

see, you know, what sort of information you can gain from

that and how you can leverage it. But I think there's always

going to be a place for the wands or the handheld devices,

because cycle counts may still be valuable. If you don't have

coverage of the entire store, it's a much the barrier to entry

is much lower to get one or two handhelds for a store, as

opposed to outfitting it with entirely with fixed

infrastructure. And there's other ways that we can use

handhelds to, like, using the Finder function to locate

inventory, or, yeah, so it, it, it, I think it's a combination

of different technologies, or different forms of the same

technology there that will drive the true business value.