RFID helps Italian clothing logistics companies speed up distribution

The reader system started shipping at the end of November 2009. Meredith Lamborn, a member of the LTC RFID project investigation team, said that thanks to this system, the clothing product distribution process of two customers has been speeded up.

LTC, which completes orders each year involving 10 million items, is expected to process 400,000 RFID-labeled products for Royal Trading srl (high-end men’s and women’s shoes with the Serafini brand) and San Giuliano Ferragamo in 2010. Both Italian companies embed EPC Gen 2 RFID tags in their products, or put RFID tags on their products during production.

Shoes with RFID tags embedded

As early as 2007, LTC was considering the application of this technology, and its customer Royal Trading also encouraged LTC to build its own RFID reader design system. At that time, Royal Trading was developing a system that used RFID technology to track the inventory of Serafini merchandise in the store. The shoe company hopes to use RFID identification technology to better understand the inventory of each store, while preventing the loss and theft of goods.

LTC’s IT department used Impinj Speedway readers to build a set of portal readers with 8 antennas and a set of channel readers with 4 antennas. The aisle reader is surrounded by a metal fence, Lamborn said, it looks a bit like a cargo container box, which ensures that the reader can only pass through the tags, rather than adjacent to other clothing RFID tags. In the testing phase, the staff adjusted the antenna of the channel reader to read the stacked goods. LTC has achieved a reading rate of 99.5%.

“Accurate reading rate is very important,” Lamborn said, “because we must compensate for lost products, the system must achieve a reading rate of nearly 100%.”

When the products are sent from the production point to the LTC warehouse, those RFID-labeled products are sent to a specific unloading point, where workers move the pallets through the door reader. Non-RFID-labeled products are sent to other unloading areas, where workers use bar scanners to read the bar codes of individual products.

When the EPC Gen 2 tag of the product is successfully read by the door reader, the product is sent to the designated location in the warehouse. LTC sends an electronic receipt to the manufacturer and stores the product’s SKU code (written in the RFID tag) in its database.

When receiving an order for RFID-labeled products, LTC puts the correct products in the box according to the order and transports them to the aisle reader located near the shipping area. By reading the RFID tags of each product, the system identifies the products, confirms their correctness, and prints the packing list and places it in the box. The LTC information system upgrades the product status, indicating that these products have been packaged and are ready to be shipped.

According to Lamborn, the retailer did not read the RFID tag when receiving the product. However, Royal Trading staff will visit stores from time to time and use handheld RFID readers to take inventory of Serafini products.

According to Lamborn, the use of an RFID system reduces the time it takes to generate a product packing list by 30%. In terms of receiving goods, the company now only needs to use one employee to complete the work of 5 people in the past when processing the same quantity of goods; the work of the past 120 minutes can now be completed in 3 minutes.

This project took two years and passed a long testing phase. During this period, LTC worked with apparel manufacturers to determine the minimum amount of label to be used and the best labeling position.