Day 1

After nice welcoming words from Jorma Lalla, CEO of Nordic ID the audience got split into two groups. Group A went for a store visit to American Apparel to listen to none other than Mr. Kris Doane letting people in on the RFID solutions they have chosen. Group B started listening to presentations.

American Apparel RFID story 

Nainan Kurian - Liwa Stores / GANT

Mr. Nainan Kurian, CEO of Technowave Group introduced an interesting case from the United Arab Emirates. He went through the processes that the Liwa Group was using before the RFID roll out and what problems they needed to solve. In terms of the old system there was certain limitation why it didn't provide the wanted results. The old methods involved extensive scanning, loads of manpower and human error. The biggest issue was shrinkage. Mr. Kurian went through how the Liwa Group decided to face these issues and how they ended up with RFID as the perfect solution to their situation. Reasons for choosing RFID were listed, such as faster scanning. Mr. Kurian went through the implementation of the whole system and the challenges that were encountered. As future plans Mr. Kurian named that Liwa Group is planning to extend the use of RFID within the GANT brand and to other brands as well.

More on the Liwa Group - GANT case. 

Maciek Sadowski - Creating Customer Value with new technologies

Young Master Sadowski started with key concepts working his way to creating customer value with item-level RFID & NCF and finishing with typical use cases and suggestions. To make it simple he concentrated on the functional and hedonic value of customer value types and went through the value sources that affect them and how different stages of adopting new technologies reflect in the matrix of customer value sources and customer value and technologies. Later on a summary of Mr. Maciek Sadowski's research will be on the RFID Arena as an article. The link shall later appear here.

Managing environmental challenges such as cross reading in the world of RFID

Mr. Janne Mäkeläinen and Mr. Lothar Struckmeier held a presentation about the environmental challenges of RFID, such as cross reading, and how to deal with them. They covered the basics of the technology, antenna reading, tag positioning and went through a test conducted by the School of RFID.

You can find more on the subject here. 

Live Demo

Next up was a live demo and a lucky member of the audience got to be a test driver. First a rack of clothes was counted manually. It took 2,5 minutes. Next up was the Nordic ID Morphic UHF RFID Cross Dipole and it finished the task in 15 seconds, with all the correct sizes and colors. The live demo was a fun exercise between the presentations.

Mikko Nikkanen - NFC based marketing

Mr. Mikko Nikkanen from Smartrac held a presentation on NFC based marketing. He went through the extensive portfolio of RFID and NFC they offer to retail and apparel solutions. He brought the audience up to date on what is going on with NFC at the moment and what NFC can bring to marketing in terms of for example campaigning. He pointed out that NFC is a consumer driven business and that it concentrates on retail applications, brand and product authentication and adding to the consumer shopping experience. He covered brand protection in very ground level as to embedding the NFC inlay, how counterfeiting occurs and how to increase security with the help of NFC. He also continued with the shopping experience, which is a trend we all already run into daily.

Jean Cristophe Lecosse - RFID in France

Mr. Jean Cristophe Lecosse from CNRFID wanted to give an update on what the world of RFID is looking like in France today. He first covered the CNRFID and its services and then continued to the market for retail RFID, application values and of course application examples. He went through studies that show the growth of RFID in retail, especially in terms of turnover and number of tags deployed in retail RFID. He then showed the values of RFID in the supply chain and the ROI potentials. He gave an example of a successful retail RFID deployment; Serge Blanco - they use RFID from DC to point-of-sale including inventory and shrinkage control in warehouses, control of receipts and shipments at DC. He also mentioned Auchan, Optical Center, Cléor and Rica Lewis as references. 

Road -to-success: RFID cases in Specialty Retail

Questioning Why and If are no longer relevant in today's retail community when talking about RFID. It is more and more about When and How. Mrs. Jessica Säilä, Nordic ID Business Development Director, claims that by 2018 80% of retailers will have adopted RFID. For a successful RFID path you need to start with the basic lego blocks: your items + interrogator + tags + software and you will achieve 99% inventory accuracy. Detailed she went through each lego block and its effect on fashion retail. Next she tackled the garment life cycle and how RFID works in each point.

The same benefits can be seen in the video Designed, delivered, sold.

The first seminar day ended with a nice dinner at the Le Grand Café Capucines and a rumor has it that a few drinks were poured in some Parisian pubs as well… 

Day 2

The day starts with another store visit for the second group.

 

In the meantime the group that already went to the store the previous day, got to hear the nice presentations by Nainan Kurian and Maciek Sadowski. 

Uwe Quiede - The RFID boost in the German Fashion Market

Mr. Uwe Quiede presented an extensive list of German retailers that are already at full speed with RFID. He went through the different stages of an RFID project from the beginning to the end. He also recapped all the benefits that RFID brings but from a different angle. He went through values that retailers have received through RFID and there were even new findings. As in every project that gets started. The received benefits exceed the amount expected. Challenges within projects and solutions were covered.

S.Oliver RFID video 

Scanman exercise

To keep people awake it was time to get them moving. Nordic ID HQ had prepared a short exercise video called: I am Scanman. The video starred Nordic ID engineer guys and girls from marketing, sales and business development and showed the audience a little bit of the craziness that lives inside each Finnish person. Everyone had a laugh and the short exercise moment relaxed the atmosphere. 

Software tricks to boost performance for RFID based inventory and product search

The presentation by Jessica Säilä included the challenging scenarios for apparel retail and suggested settings for software, human factors and how to get started. As to challenging scenarios, mass reading, cross reading and trying to know exactly what you read instead of reading too much were dealt with. The audience was given specific tips on handling the situations. Jessica also showed charts showing clearly how much training improves reading results with RFID. The first 90% of tags gets read fast and the last 10% takes a long time. Taking the human factor in account the reading performance can be affected.

Some additional links:

RFID reading performance tricks

100+1 mobile RFID applications in apparel supply chain

RFID SW development - understanding inventory with select parameters 

RFID & privacy

In order to start the discussion about privacy issues a short video was shown. The audience got to see it before the finger food lunch and then continued with the following topics:

• PIA (Privacy Impact Assesment) - for officials
• What kind of issues are there to discuss? What are people worried about?- Who does it concern? Who should you be talking to?
• According to GS1 US this is not an issue in the USA. Why? What is different here?
• How, when and why to address the issue?
• What are the platforms where the people talk?
• Lobbying for RFID? Why? Where? To who?
• The interest groups already talk in forums and do their lobbying, can we let them lead the discussion and not take part? Can we afford that?

RFID and Privacy video.

RFID and Privacy article.

 

Yes, we had a great seminar with excellent presentations. And more than that, we had a fabulous time! We thank all the participants, speakers and audience alike, for making the event as good as it was.

A couple of quotes from the event:

"I took 15 pages of notes".

"I really love you, I want to be your fan. Do you have Facebook or something?"

"The exercise was so much fun, I loved it! Thanks!"

If you want more detailed information on the presentations, please contact marketing@nordicid.com.

Pre-enrollment for upcoming events is already ongoing.