From Distribution Center To Retail Floor in 3 Days versus 14

Here's an interesting overview about P&G's end-to-end electronic product-code (EPC) solution they are hammering out with the help of a company called Vue Technology.

Here's is what I think may be the most salient paragraph and then I'll just drop in a few of their quoted stats -- such as their calculation that in the United States the U.S retail industry loses $56 billion annually due to shrinkage and lost sales. Shrinkage is their world for theft.

Here's their innovation in their own words:

"With item-level tagging you want antennas everywhere," says Vue senior VP of product management Tim Von Kaenel. "In the past you needed one reader for every five antennas or so, and the simple math around doing item-level deployments shows that that would bankrupt most companies. Our innovation is to add networking capability between the reader and the antennas, so now they can read across thousands of antennas, bringing RFID out of the backroom and into mainstream retail environments."

The results? Here's some from P&G director of global external relations Paul Fox.

"The best previous benchmark we had for getting the product from our own distribution center to the retail floor so we had solid coverage was 14 days," adds Fox. "What we saw was that we had 92 percent in-store availability after three days -- an absolutely astonishing result."

and...

Fox declines to specify how much P&G has invested in RFID technology but says that the Fusion launch and other pilot programs indicate that annual ROI will reach 20 to 25 percent.