South African retailer Woolworths is rolling out RFID technology from Dutch company Nedap to more than 200 stores.

Nedap’s iD Cloud will be used to increase stock accuracy and optimise product availability within stores.

The rollout will involve 217 Woolworths stores across South Africa. Nedap’s iD Cloud will optimise stock accuracy and in-store replenishment on a large scale as part of the brand’s long-term objective to sell more with less stock.

The deployment will see Woolworths’ fashion, beauty and home stores benefit from the value-driven features that form part of Nedap’s iD Cloud platform and its ability to create stock visibility across the value chain. It can help streamline in-store operations while increasing on-floor availability of its products.

This will let Woolworths lower the time spent counting and restocking the sales floor, which will assist in ensuring high on-floor product availability. The technology will also provide up-to-date stock levels synchronised with an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system to attain high levels of stock accuracy.

The iD Cloud (www.nedap-retail.com/platform) ensures Woolworths store staff receive refill suggestions that allow them to replenish products proactively from the stock room to the sales floor when needed. This eliminates error-prone manual checks, leading to missed sales by not having an item available on the sales floor.

“We chose Nedap because our extensive market evaluation has shown that no other supplier has the experience they do,” said Christie Koorts, CIO at Woolworths (www.woolworths.co.za). “Nedap has a clear roadmap vision for RFID, driven through a partnership approach, supported by the technical ability that iD Cloud offers. We are excited to start this journey with them. RFID is an important strategic asset for us, and we are looking at adding loss prevention measures and supply chain enhancements in the future.”

Bruno Bakker, director of sales at Nedap, added: “We are very pleased to start this long-term partnership with premium retailer Woolworths. With the large number of products flowing through their supply chain, it is crucial to have accurate insights into store stock to avoid them from being overstocked. By having accurate data, Woolworths can lower inventory levels without missing a sale and using the money that used to be spent on buying stock for further business optimisation.”

This project has been realised in collaboration with Nedap (www.nedap-retail.com) partner StegTech (stegtech.co.za).