Japanese apparel company Baroque Japan Ltd. has improved the speed and accuracy of its existing RFID solution by introducing P3 Finder, a 3D RFID reading application from RFLocus that provides a real-time view of inventory in 150 of its 700 stores worldwide. The company already installs UHF RFID tags on all of the merchandise it receives, stores and sells, and the P3 Finder application is used on its handheld readers and integrated with Sensormatic's TrueVUE Cloud software to provide access to location data in stores and distribution centers to quickly deliver merchandise to customers.

By building the P3 Finder radar navigation application into the company's RFID readers, Baroque Japan is better able to meet the demands of "buy online, pick up in store" (BOPIS) purchasing, ensuring that inventory quantities remain accurate and up-to-date at each store. According to RFLocus CEO Tomoyuki Asano, the P3 Finder tool is designed to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction by sorting merchandise faster. The retailer says its employees can more easily find items in the store that need to be restocked.

Quickly find items in distribution centers for online sales

Baroque Japan opened its first store in 2000, offering clothing lines such as Moussy and Sly. The company sells 21 brands in stores in Japan, China, Hong Kong, China and the U.S., and operates wholesale operations in 26 countries/regions. Its Higashimatsuyama Sagawa distribution center is managed with the help of the company's warehouse management software for product positioning, says Takushi Tokuno, general manager of Baroque Japan's logistics department. However, the main task of picking and inspecting goods is performed by humans, so errors inevitably occur.

Without an automated method to capture inventory quantities, such errors tend to go unnoticed. A common error can be a discrepancy between the number of products listed in the system and the actual number of items in the field. when inventory is counted, Tokuno says, items thought to be missing are often found in the field. In stores, the number of items in the data doesn't always match the number of items on the floor or in inventory, and sales opportunities are missed because items that should have been available on site cannot be found.

The need for high-precision positioning

Retailers report that online purchasing has made inventory accuracy in warehouses and stores more important than ever. the Higashimatsuyama Sagawa Distribution Center is an integrated warehouse where products sold in stores and those sold via the Web can be managed. Since inventory management data is linked to an online system, products can be displayed as available for purchase by customers as long as they are in stock at the distribution center or at the store.

The distribution center contains a large and complex set of inventory. For online products, unlike store inventory, products remain in stock after the selling season and are still available for sale. When purchased offline, the product must be located in a warehouse and shipped directly to the buyer's chosen delivery location, such as their home or a neighboring store. However, products are often not in the warehouse where they should be, so there can be discrepancies between the data in the system and what is actually in the field.

In the future, Tokuno says, our company will move further toward RFID-based product management. That could mean deploying the P3 Finder application in other stores. Looking ahead, he would like to see a partnership between RFLocus and Johnson Controls, which he speculates could lead to more effective inventory management. In addition to P3 Finder, he says, there are many other technologies and services that we are interested in. These include RFLocus' Locus Mapping solution, which displays product and inventory locations on a digital map, and RFID GO doors.

Locus Mapping is a cloud-based inventory management solution that helps track assets and their locations in large warehouses. After walking into a warehouse setup, staff can use the P3 Finder app to survey all assets, after which the scan results are displayed digitally. According to Asano, RFLocus is actively expanding its deployment operations beyond the Japanese market. We believe that P3 Finder has significantly reduced the number of cases where products could not be sold due to inventory issues, he said.