RFID led to 100% increasing of sales of Moods of Norway!

Scandinavian retailer Moods of Norway (MoN) implemented RFID technology in 14 of their brand stores for inventory efficiency. This decision was made after a successful realization of the pilot project in several brand stores, which led to the significant increasing of sales.
During the pilot project, which consisted of tagging men's shirts and suits, and using a handheld reader to conduct inventory counts on the sales floor, the system not only provided 98 to 99 percent inventory accuracy, but also reduced the amount of labor employees spent performing manual inventory checks, thereby enabling daily and even off-schedule inventory.
According to Hans Petter Hübert, Moods of Norway's supply chain manager, the results were so impressive that the company decided to expand its RFID usage beyond inventory tracking on the sales floor.
Hübert says he had been aware of RFID technology and how it could be used for retail inventory management. At a GS1 conference held last year in Oslo, he had a conversation with Dutch technology firm Nedap about testing a solution. According to Hübert "is a no-brainer for a company like ours," which aims to replenish 70 percent of the items it sells as soon as any of those products are sold, and thus requires high inventory accuracy in order to ensure goods are replenished correctly. If replenishment does not occur, customers cannot purchase those items, resulting in a loss of sales revenue.
The company also wanted to add features enabling it to provide pick-up options to its online customers. Currently, according to Hübert, online buyers of MoN products cannot visit a nearby store to pick up purchased goods, because the company needed a way to ensure the inventory accuracy is strong enough that it can guarantee every product will be available for each customer as he or she arrives. If the firm had only 75 or 80 percent inventory accuracy, it could not be confident that the goods would be available in the store when needed. The average industry-wide stock accuracy is below 70 percent. That’s why Hübert believes, that MoN had been doing better than many stores—but not accurately enough for management's liking.
During the pilot, staff members employed the !D Hand reader and iPod to conduct two in-store inventory checks twice weekly. Danny Haak, Nedap's RFID product manager, says, that the reader is simple to use and easy to maneuver. As an alternative to a larger, more cumbersome handheld, the !D Hand consists of a lightweight wand with a single button that a worker can press to capture tag IDs and forward that data to the iPod for collecting data about tags being read, and then forwarding that information to the cloud via a Wi-Fi connection.
According to Hübert, prior to the pilot, each of the two test stores required 30 to 40 man-hours to perform inventory counts of all products on the sales floor. With RFID, however, inventory checks of the tagged items (representing about one-quarter of each store's inventory) could be accomplished within approximately 15 minutes. Hübert adds, that during the pilot's early stages, another 30 to 60 minutes were required to reconcile the read data with expected inventory counts and then follow up with the store manager; as employees and management became used to the system, that reconciliation process was not needed as much.
Having implemented RFID in 14 of its stores, the company is also tagging a third category of goods - men's pants. The garments' manufacturers, instead of MoN’s DC, are now tagging all apparel categories. MoN intends to RFID-tag all children's, sports, women's and men's clothing, as well as footwear, for the spring and summer 2015 seasons. Moods of Norway next intends to integrate the RFID software with its own ERP-system, so that inventory data collected from readers will automatically be forwarded to the company's back-end software.
MoN also intends to begin using RFID to record when goods are moved from the backroom to the sales floor, thereby ensuring that there is an accurate inventory record of the goods stored in the backroom, and that replenishment in that backroom is carried out when needed. To enable this, Haak says, Nedap will provide its !D Top wall-mount reader, which comes with "dynamic beam steering" to track the angle from which a tag's RF signal is received, in order to identify in which direction a tag is moving. This, he says, will enable the firm to understand if an item is leaving a store, or if it is moving from the backroom to the sales floor. The read data will be sent to the cloud-based server, where Nedap software updates each item's status to indicate if something has left the backroom and must, therefore, be replenished.
At one store's exit, Moods of Norway is currently testing an !D Gate hybrid 8.2 MHz EAS and passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID reading device provided by Nedap. In this case, the UHF reader captures the ID number of any tagged product leaving the store, and thereby updates inventory levels to reflect that the item is now missing and must be replenished.
With the use of RFID, Hübert says, the pilot stores not only achieved a double-digit sales increase for the tagged product categories, but also showed better general performance compared with MoN's other stores. He attributes this to employees being happier with their work since they can spend more time with customers and less time searching for missing stock. The company also hopes, in the near future, to enable online customers to pick up purchased goods at neighboring stores, thanks to the improved inventory accuracy resulting from its adoption of RFID.
Hübert states, that “a main goal is to take away non-value-adding activities from the store employees. The time which can be freed up due to using RFID in the stores, the store employees will use on what they love to do: providing excellent customer service."