In the Age of Digitization, Simplicity and Scale Are Retailers’ Tools to Success

From local businesses to popular big-box chains to luxury stores and everything in between, “success” looks vastly different for every retailer. Maintaining a strong brand reputation, attracting and retaining customers, and innovating and integrating new processes and technologies are key areas all retailers must prioritize to ensure long-term growth. However, what retailers often overlook are the very processes that make up how and with what systems they manage their inventory, a crucial part of a successful customer experience.

According to a recent survey by Impinj of retail supply chain leaders, 36 percent are investing in new technology and business models to more rapidly respond to changes in customer demand. Today, traditional inventory management systems fail to power the speed and scale retailers need to quickly adapt to shifting customer preferences. Retailers must approach this barrier to inventory success through both simplification and implementation. Achieving this begins by re-evaluating their current systems and implementing innovative solutions to optimize inventory management, enhance operations, and improve customer experiences.

Inventory Management: What Are Retailers’ Current Top Pain Points?

The same survey of retail supply chain leaders found that 30 percent identified real-time inventory visibility and accuracy as one of their biggest challenges to supply chain integrity. Among the top pain points retailers face when it comes to inventory management stems from the use of barcode-based processes, which have traditionally been used for data tracking, inventory oversight, and point of sale. These processes are time consuming, labor intensive, and carry the risk of inaccurate inventory tracking. Barcodes require manual intervention by needing to physically label and scan products, and if barcode labels are misplaced, damaged, or do not match the physical product to the entry in the inventory system, it leads to an overall inaccurate picture of a retailer’s inventory.

When retailers shift away from these traditional systems and instead adopt solutions built for lean and agile operations, then they can best optimize and achieve greater inventory visibility.

Smarter Inventory Management Begins With Innovative Solutions Built for Simplicity and Scale

Global retailer MINISO, whose merchandise consists of a wide range of beauty and wellness products as well as snacks and beverages, faced difficulty in managing its vast, high turnover inventory across its 200 U.S. locations. MINISO launches 100 new SKUs every seven days, and its barcode-based system made it challenging to manage new product rollouts, while large barcode labels were incompatible for smaller merchandise.

Seeking a solution that better fit its speed and scale, MINISO turned to RAIN RFID, a passive, battery-free wireless technology leveraged by retailers across the globe as an alternative to traditional barcode-based systems. This RAIN RFID-based solution provided the retailer with custom tags built to scale up or down to fit the entire range of MINISO’s products. This enabled MINISO to simplify its operations by requiring fewer tags to cover the entirety of its inventory.

Equipped to quickly identify and locate merchandise without direct line of sight, RAIN RFID can also verify up to 1,000 tagged items per second for items as far as 30 feet away. This enabled MINISO to quickly scale its inventory network through the number of products that can be easily and quickly identified through the custom tags. By transitioning away from a barcode-based inventory system, MINISO gained the ability to tag even its smallest items, gained complete oversight of its inventory quantity, status information and location, and freed up employees from needing to perform time-consuming inventory counts.

This integration also proved successful in optimizing inventory sales as product managers gained crucial insights into how well different products were selling or not selling across different store locations, enabling MINISO to quickly shift inventory based on evolving market and demand needs.

While it's no easy task to fully transition the systems a retailer once relied on for managing its inventory and overall operations, adopting and integrating alternative (or, in some cases, additive) solutions like RAIN RFID provides retailers with the power to streamline and scale their operations. Lean solutions like RAIN RFID can also provide extended benefits beyond inventory control, including bolstering sustainability and global ESG compliance efforts, ensuring authenticity of products before they reach consumers, as well as enhancing loss prevention. Today’s fast-paced retail landscape demands that retailers identify opportunities to make inventory management and oversight more adaptive and efficient to match.

George Dyche is vice president of Endpoint IC Product Management – Impinj, RAIN RFID solutions for boundless IoT.