Staples Business Depot Sees Positive Results From Active Tag Test
Featuring Joe Soares, director of process engineering, Staples Business Depot

Used with permission from RFID Journal, Inc.

Although the Canadian company found that the RFID system slashed out-of-stock levels and increased sales, it has yet to determine whether those benefits outweigh the costs of deploying the system chain-wide.

Since May, Staples Business Depot, the 270-store Canadian unit of Staples Inc., has been tracking the location and number of roughly 1,500 stock-keeping units (SKUs) at one of its Montreal retail locations. To do this, the retailer has been using IntelliTracker active RFID tags and readers, a proprietary system made by RFID systems provider AbsoluteSky. Fujitsu Transaction Solutions provided installation and integration services for this platform.

The use of RFID has eliminated theft, slashed out-of-stock levels and increased sales of tagged items, says Joe Soares, Staples Business Depot's director of process engineering. According to Soares, the system has proven itself from a technical standpoint. However, he says, the company is still evaluating the business benefits it could accrue from rolling out the RFID solution across its stores on a permanent basis.

"There was no shrinkage on the tagged items during the trial," Soares explains. Although the tag would have triggered an alarm if someone had tried to exit the store with a tagged item that had not been paid for, no alarm events occurred during the pilot, and no tagged items left the store unsold. Soares, therefore, believes the mere presence of an IntelliTracker tag might have served as a theft deterrent.