Retail Research Initiative

The apparel retail industry is on the one hand facing challenges from increasing competition, consolidations, and thus increasing pressure to reduce costs. On the other hand, customers are getting more demanding, resulting in shorter fashion cycles, and demands for new customer experience. RFID technology is supposed to raise efficiency and to enable innovative customer service offerings. Besides cost savings, benefits are expected to arise from newly designed RFID applications and customer insights from analyses of shop floor data. Recently, apparel retailers started to investigate this technology, resulting in several trials and pilots world-wide. However, the business case of RFID in the apparel retail industry is not clear. Based on the findings of a real-world deployment, our contribution presents a cost-benefit calculator that is specifically designed to meet the requirements of apparel retail industry RFID implementations

This contribution is concerned with the business value of RFID technology in retail. We present a case study of an RFID project at Galeria Kaufhof, a subsidiary of Metro Group and one of the largest department store chains in Europe. The project encompasses a variety of RFID applications at the interface of store logistics and customer service. The contribution that our study makes to the literature is threefold. First, we describe an innovative large-scale trial that goes beyond what was done in earlier projects in several respects. The most fundamental difference compared to previous trials is the full integration of RFID event data with POS and master data, which for the first time offers the retailer the opportunity to directly observe and analyse physical in-store processes. Second, the heterogeneity of RFID applications implemented by Kaufhof allows us to theorize about the effects that RFID may have on business processes from an IT value perspective. We develop a conceptual model to explain the different cause-and-effect chains between RFID investments and their impact on firm performance, the role of complementary and contextual factors, and the difficulties in assessing these impacts using objective performance measures. Third, we compare the case to a prior trial conducted by Kaufhof about five years earlier. The differences between the lessons that the company learned in the two projects illustrates the impact of technological advances and standardization efforts in recent years on the managerial perceptions of RFID business value, which allows for the derivation of a number of useful implications for practice.

The growing interest in the use and application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) on the part of the retail industry in recent years has sparked an intensive debate in academia and practice on the benefits to be expected. A large number of white papers, articles in trade journals, and research contributions have discussed the impact of RFID on supply chain performance. The majority of prior works has so far concentrated on operational efficiency gains from RFID-based process automation. In contrast, our research is motivated by the question, to what extent retail companies can draw benefits beyond simple efficiency gains from the analysis of large amounts of RFID data.

This contribution is concerned with the business value of large amounts of data generated by RFID data collection infrastructures. We present the case example of a department store that implemented RFID in its menswear department to seamlessly track thousands of items on their way from the distribution centre to the point of sale. The recorded trace data allow for a number of quantitative analyses, which provide novel insights into in-store logistics and customer behaviour on the sales floor. We provide a detailed overview of the underlying raw data, the deployed mechanisms for data filtering and aggregation, and the analysis procedures for generating business-relevant information. Our case study findings indicate that RFID poses an untapped opportunity for retail companies to improve category management, store layout design, inventory control, and process execution

This contribution deals with the business value of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in the apparel retail industry. We present a case study of an RFID project at Galeria Kaufhof, a subsidiary of Metro Group and one of the largest department store chains in Europe. The trial shows that operational efficiency gains through the automation of logistical in-store processes, such as inventory taking or goods receipt, are possible. Moreover, RFID enables new customer applications on the sales floor, which allow for a redesign of the customer interface, and thus an improvement of the service processes and the service quality. In addition, the analyses of the gathered data on the sales floor help to close the "data void" between the goods receipt and the POS of the department store, thus offering the opportunity to directly observe and analyze physical in-store processes. The data analyses allow for deriving valuable information for the department store management in the areas of inventory management, category management, store layout management, and department store processes.