Marks & Spencer Expands RFID Program with Avery Dennison

At the NRF 102nd Annual Convention & EXPO, Avery Dennison announced an expansion of its nine-year RFID supply partnership with Marks & Spencer PLC (M&S), a leading U.K.-based apparel and food retailer.

In order to provide an exceptional customer experience by ensuring that the correct product mix is available in-store and online, M&S has expanded its use of Avery Dennison’s RFID technology to all clothing and home wares in its stores. This roll out will take place throughout all departments in the course of 2013 and will be complete by spring 2014.

RFID partners since 2003, Marks & Spencer and Avery Dennison have worked together for nine years to create specific RFID tags that are fully integrated into a complete range of labels and tickets.

Prior to implementing RFID, M&S relied on optical scanners to track inventory – using barcodes to scan a maximum of 400-600 items per hour. RFID allows merchandise to be accurately scanned at up to 15,000 items per hour.

Avery Dennison has supplied almost one billion RFID tags to M&S with no data loss or duplication. The tags can be read when an RFID scanner is up to a meter away, making the inventory tracking process faster and more efficient.

RFID technology from Avery Dennison allows M&S to replenish stock from the distribution center more quickly and accurately, making more garment sizes available to more customers.

In the future, M&S plans to expand the use of RFID scanning throughout the supply chain to increase accuracy and speed of distribution.

“Having accurate stock information is a driver for our whole business, especially when it comes to multi-channel,” said Kim Phillips, head of packaging, Marks & Spencer. “The RFID partnership with Avery Dennison is allowing us to replenish stock from the distribution center more accurately, making more garment sizes available to more customers and continuing to prove its value over and over again.”

“We are pleased to have partnered with M&S over the last nine years as an industry leader in the activation of RFID by proving out their business case and delivering on the operational efficiencies promised by the technology,” added Shawn Neville, president, retail branding and information solutions, Avery Dennison. “As one of the UK’s biggest retailers, M&S is focused on providing exceptional customer experience and RFID enables that experience by ensuring inventory accuracy from the distribution center to the store floor, providing shoppers with consistent and accurate product availability in-store and online.”