Wal-Mart, Best Buy Spearhead DVD-Tagging Pilot
Featuring Gay Whitney, standards director, EPCglobal

Used with permission from RFID Journal, Inc.

The retailers, along with other EPCglobal members from the media and entertainment industry, are testing RFID's ability to provide visibility into where items are located, when they were placed there and when more need to be ordered.

Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and other members of EPCglobal's Media and Entertainment Industry Interest Group are conducting an item-level DVD-tagging pilot with EPC RFID tags to help ensure that DVDs are in stock and available on the store floor at the proper time.

Participants in the pilot consist of media and entertainment companies throughout the supply chain, including production studios, replicators, distributors, and retailers. Upon completion of the eight-week pilot, the participants hope to have gained enough information to move toward a broader deployment of item-level RFID tags.

The industry members hope RFID will afford them greater visibility into where the products are located, as well as when they were placed there and when the time comes to order more inventory. In addition, they hope the technology will help prevent titles from running out of stock. "It can help us ensure that we have product on the store shelves when customers need them," says Wal-Mart spokesperson John Simley.