RFID Speeds Up Wills Lifestyle Business

Garments destined for the Rs 300-crore fashion house that belongs to the ITC Group slowed down when they got to warehouses. "The challenge was to deal with large volumes because people had been doing it manually," says O.P. Bansal, CIO (Former), ITC Lifestyle Retailing.

Everyday that a box of clothing stayed shelved in the warehouse, was a day less on display and 10 hours worth less of opportunities to make a sale. With traditional and manual practices, there was only so much by which the company could crunch its time-to-market cycles. Looking to streamline operations, ITC Lifestyle Retailing identified RFID as the solution that could best increase the company's responsiveness. "The aim was to speed up existing processes, reduce time-to-market, handle material efficiently, and bring more accuracy of books versus physical stock," says Bansal.

Like other RFID implementations, the IT team at ITC Lifestyle Retailing bumped into challenges of read accuracy, read speed and tag orientation. That's when they turned to solutions such as PLC-based RFID tunnels for the warehouse and smart, customized point-of-sale software (POS) for the stores.

To mitigate the high costs of the tags, other organizations normally reuse them. Bansal says that it was not feasible to reuse the tags since the logistics of retrieving the tags and reprinting information on them - on repetitive basis - was a sizeable task.

Still over a single season, the company saw the prices of the tags fall by over 30 percent. But given that ITC Lifestyle Retailing is currently tagging 1.6 million garments a year, price is still a challenge, says Bansal.

Today, it takes 20-30 seconds to inventory 30-35 garments (about one boxes worth) - from between five and eight minutes. Currently, on any given day, each worker can handle between 2,000 and 3,000 garments - from by 300 to 400 - an incredible efficiency jump.

"If we can save time in the warehouse that means every garment is getting about seven days earlier to the store. And that makes more business sense to me," says Bansal. With some garments getting as much as an extra 10 to 15-day window, ITC Lifestyle Retailing has seen a 1 to 2 percent uptick in sales.

Also, the percentage of manual errors has been reduced greatly because each tag has a unique identity and reconciliation is more accurate. Assuming a 0.1 percent error rate across three lakh products every month, Bansal estimates saving worth Rs 60 lakh a year.

The Person Behind It

O.P. Bansal

CIO (Former), ITC Lifestyle Retailing

Saving time means a garment gets moretime at the store. That makes more business sense to me than saving labor costs.