Item-Level Tagging, or ILT for short, is increasingly becoming more affordable and thus more common in RFID applications. As its name implies, it involves adding RFID tags to individual products, as opposed to simply tagging pallets of merchandise when it arrives and tracking it in your facility. The latter approach offered more conveniences than traditional barcodes, but now, merchandising demands require more specific, product-by-product data.
As such, ILT allows you to manage and track inventory down to the exact location and number available. With this in mind, applying ILT to your business often leads to the following:
Reducing Losses
Because you can track individual items simply by scanning them, you know where are they in stores, a truck, or a warehouse, if and when they arrived, how well they’re selling, if they were stolen and by whom, and the frequency a particular item gets stolen. With this data, retailers ensure that more inventory is shipped and sold, rather than lost.
Efficiently Managing Stock
As each individual item can now be located, you can use the tags’ data to determine how much inventory is on the floor, where it is, which colors need to be stocked, and what’s in the stock rooms. With these points in mind, you can decide which products should be visible on the shelves and which should be on clearance.
Streamlined Management and Costs
Think of ILT as a hyper-focused version of RFID implementation. With all of the data available, your company can reduce transportation costs when shipping merchandise, and can save on time and labor within the supply chain.
Because of these several factors, retailers, particularly those managing apparel, consumer goods, electronics, and groceries, have requested that vendors start adding the tags to their own merchandise. This, in turn, eliminates applying the tags to individual goods once they’ve arrived in your company’s warehouse.
Interested in applying ILT to your company’s supply chain? Start working with Gateway RFID Solutions. To determine what would work for your business, contact us today.