The Foschini Group has committed to deploying RFID technology across its brands, beginning with its menswear brand Markham, throughout South Africa and beyond, in order to bring inventory accuracy above 95 percent.

Jul 26, 2019—

South African fashion retailer The Foschini Group (TFG) has launched a UHF RFID solution across 500 stores throughout a four-month period for its Markham brands, with plans to apply RFID to its products company-wide. TFG’s goal is to bring its inventory accuracy to between 95 and 98 percent, thereby preventing out-of-stock events in stores, while enabling “buy online pick-up in store” (BOPIS) sales in the near future. The program was launched in February 2019, and the company expects to have the technology live at 1,000 stores by the end of this year.

Martin Kurc, TFG’s senior operations business process manager, and Michelle McCann, the company’s RFID project manager, presented their RFID technology strategy and experiences at RFID Journal LIVE! Retail at RetailX, held in Chicago in June 2019. The solution is provided by RIoT Insight. With the system in place, Kurc says, the company can count inventory at a 51,000-unit store within only a few hours, typically by a single employee, while the same process with barcode inventory-based counters took several days with a store’s full team pitching in.

The Foschini Group is a Cape Town-based company with 28,000 employees. It sells home and sporting goods, as well as jewelry and women’s and men’s fashion brands, throughout South Africa and globally. Altogether, the firm operates 4,000 stores with 28 brands, selling products in 32 countries and five continents, and there are 12 million loyalty rewards users in South Africa alone. One brand in TFG is the Markham chain of men’s clothing stores. Markham has a long history (the brand has been in existence for as long as Levi Strauss), but is currently focused on a modern, more digital approach to sales.

“Modern consumer behavior is changing, and we must innovate to keep up with the times,” Kurck told the LIVE! Retail audience. However, he said, whether selling goods online or at brick-and-mortar stores, “Inventory accuracy is the foundation. You can’t sell what you don’t have.” At each store, associates are tasked with counting inventory almost daily, which means their time is largely taken away from sales efforts. “Our biggest challenge,” he says, “is to move staff members from being stock counters to merchants.”

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Source: Retailer Rolls Out RFID Across 1,000 Stores This Year – 2019-07-26 – Page 1 – RFID Journal