Portuguese Book Megastore Deploys Item-Level RFID System
Featuring João Vilaça, director, Creativesystems

Used with permission from RFID Journal, Inc.

Portuguese book retailer Byblos has deployed an item-level RFID system in its new Lisbon store, Byblos Amoreiras, to track 250,000 books, games and videos. Byblos opened the 50,000- square-foot store for the Christmas shopping season with what Byblos COO Rui Gaspar calls the best technology available to enhance customer experience. The store, the largest in Portugal, claims to sell every book printed in Portugal.

The system includes 40 RFID-enabled kiosks where customers can learn about books and print out their sales-floor location. It also incorporates RFID security gates that sound an alarm if a tagged product is taken out of the store without being purchased, as well as 14 RFID point-of-sale (POS) reading stations. This system—which the company and its technology suppliers describe as the world's largest item-level RFID retail deployment—will enable the tracking of more than 50,000 books in the back room and about 200,000 books and other items on the sales floor. "The Byblos vision is to create the best possible experience to the visiting customer," Gaspar says, "giving complete, fast and accurate information [about] where his or her books are."

System developer and systems integrator Creativesystems provided the system using Vue Technology's TrueVUE RFID Platform. The software suite incorporates TrueVUE Site Manager, which captures all read events and manages the interrogators, and TrueVUE Essentials, which enables the store and its customers to employ RFID data for a variety of uses, such as locating books and tracking inventory.