Galeria Kaufhof, a division of Metro Group, is currently providing RFID-based shopping services for customers at its high-end department store in Essen, Germany. Participants involved with the project are calling it a "milestone" for the retail industry.
RFID solution providers Checkpoint, Impinj and Reva Systems, which teamed to orchestrate the pilot, claim it is a breakthrough item-level tagging retail apparel implementation, and say it is the world's first end-to-end UHF item-level application. The project involves the application of EPC tags to individual garments, the use of RFID-enabled dressing rooms and displays and a smart mirror.
The specific setting for the RFID pilot is the 6,500-square-foot men's apparel department of the Galeria Kaufhof, located on the entire third floor of the Essen store. As the pilot commenced, some 30,000 individual articles of clothing and accessories had hangtags embedded with EPC Gen 2 RFID labels, with 60 RFID interrogators capturing data from the labels.
"Galeria Kaufhof's deployment is the first large-scale application of near-field UHF RFID to track retail merchandise from distribution through pointof- sale," said Michael Liard, research director of RFID & contactless at ABI Research. "The newly available EPC global standards support a unified UHF Gen 2 RFID infrastructure and, combined with innovative technology, make such a real-world solution possible."
Galeria Kaufhof has been actively using RFID in logistics and warehouse pilots dating back to 2003.
As part of the project, Checkpoint Systems is contributing EAS/RFID antenna technology (including for security monitoring at entrances); Impinj is providing RFID interrogators and antennas as well as silicon chips used on tags; and Reva Systems is providing centralized management capabilities with its network infrastructure product.
According to Metro Group, the pilot, which was launched during a September 2007 press conference, will run until at least the end of this year as data is collected and analyzed. The pilot seeks to observe (among other findings), the impact of the positioning of merchandise on the sales floor and will also assess how long goods take to reach the sales floor and how long they spend there.
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