On August, 16thThe 2017 Years’ Twelfth RFID World Application Innovation Conferencewas held ceremoniously in Shenzhen Exhibition Center. More than 300 outstanding enterprises in the whole RFID industry chain, industry experts, and RFID terminal user representatives were invited to jointly analyze the industry’s development direction and new models.the sales director of American Alien –Mr. Yang Junliang shared his wonderful view titledThe Opportunities and Challenges of Smart Retail

Within a few years from 2014 to the present, many typical acquisition cases have occurred in RFID industry,such as Ruizhang acquired Alien; Invengo became a shareholder of SML and acquired Tagsys textile leasing business; CCL merged the American Checkpoint; Hongkong Brilliant Circle became a shareholder of HY-Link; Netposa merged Ningbo Laxcen; Zhuhai Zhicheng invested and bought the share of Tatwah Smartech; JinYue Investment and Zhongtian Runbang bought share of Hong Lu (formerly CLOU IoT); and CSG acquired Inlay Link.

Director Yang recalled that RFID had obtained many successful applications in global smart retail. Among them, ZARArealized a high efficiency by using RFID technology. From design concept, it just needed about 10 days to sell finished clothes; through supply chain technology of RFID application management, UR fast fashion clothing brand chainachieved 7-days’ leading time compared to the world, and its goods were updated two times per store every week.Ten thousand new products were promoted every year;after the implementation of RFID project, the global third largest retailer-- Metro Group reduced its human expense of storage by 14%, increased inventory arrival rate by 11%, reduced out-of-stock rate by 11%, and loss rate of goods by 18%. It was reported that Metro’s RFID application technology had developed to the second generation; The global largest retailer— Wal-Mart Stores was the leader of RFID technology. It requested suppliers to label in packing boxes and containers with REID, and developed a complete purchase-sale-stock system and a global satellite positioning system based on RFID and other technical functions. The use of RFID technology helped it save $8.35 billion a year.

Last year,the “connection” between RFID and the unmanned store in smart retail was extremely close. Director Yang explained that this was because RFID could provide necessary technical support for smart retail, but it would not be the unique technology. The well-known image recognition technology would be the most powerful competitor of RFID. Unmanned store became the forefront of smart retail, but it pushed RFID to the forefront position as well.

Director Yang particularly emphasized that what we saw at present wasn’t all about smart retail and RFID, because many important problems, such as recognition rate, tag price and standardization of systemic products, were required to be solved urgently, if we wanted to involve RFID in smart retailing.

In the speech, Director Yang also compared the advantages and disadvantages of most representative cases in the industry, such as the Amazon GO- unmanned convenience store, Tao café - unmanned convenience store, Future Store- an integration of vending machine, Box - mini unmanned convenience store, or store and small supermarket, Wheelys- Swedish unmanned convenience store, or store and supermarket, and the upgrade of Lawson/7-11 convenience stores from different unmanned stores’ processes, main technologies, main problems and current operation states.

Finally, Director Yang pointed out that smart retail would go through 5 important development stages including:

The seemingly outdated lead-in stage —smart retail would operate by familiar and traditional customers, entity channels, processes, indicators, business models and POS/ ERP/ E-commerce technologies. The integration between businesses and technologies would not be high. The connection between company’s strategies and vision and customer experience would be poor.

The exploring initial stage — the digital process, contact point, and customer experience would be improved in the form of virtual project groups to drive the construction of company’s digital capability. However, the goal, path and schedule of a clear digital transformation would not be established.

The practice stage with leading technologies—smart retail would partly or departmentally adopt new technologies, partners and external resources in an organized way to promote the generation of digital products, service innovation and customer experience, and extend the experimental results within the company.

The optimization stage with fine management — smart retail would continuously transform and determine the internal supply chain, commodity supply, commodity structure and customer delivery and logistics by digital technologies. The strategic guiding of digital transformation in enterprise level would be established to play its role, at the same time, the customer experience, process and system-supported transformation would be built on the enterprise-level new infrastructure.

The innovated intelligent stage— smart retail would form an innovative business model and a new ecosystem of market and industry fields to overthrow, affect and create a market. The integration of digital technology and business would become the normal and enter into a virtuous cycle of self-optimization to positively integrate the full investment of new opportunities and original businesses. Its effects would be monitored by iterative methods, so as to form a scale and realize the transformation, fine management and full participation.

However, the current main promoters of smart retail industry included three parts, separately being Internet/Internet of Things (IoT) enterprises, such as Amazon, Ali, Jingdong/Tencent, etc., traditional retail enterprises and convenience stores, like Bailian, Wahaha, Wanda, RT-MART, 7-11, Family Mart, Bright Daily, etc., and several entrepreneurial enterprises which adopted AI/RFID and other new technologies.

Generally speaking, when RFID is applied in the unmanned stores of smart retail, it still faces many challenges, including technology, price, rapid deployment, material damage, continuous Research and development (R&D), etc. The three factors—RFID, artificial intelligence, and big data will play an important role to promote or restrict smart retail.