Editor’s Note: The RFID industry is growing rapidly, and SML Group is a leader in the industry, with strong positions in apparel and new opportunities in the food sector. Dean Frew, president of RFID Solutions at SML, has been in the RFID field since 1999, founding Xterprise LLC, an item-level RFID software subsidiary, in 2002, which he sold to SML in 2013. Frew discusses RFID’s potential as well as new developments at SML.

Printed Electronics Now: How has the RFID industry changed since you started in it?

Dean Frew: In 1999, we were part of a team, along with industry technologists at MIT, who were setting up industry standards. The technology from UHF RFID was still relatively new and the industry did a fantastic job of developing a standard approach for setting up communication with RFID readers, which enabled the market to grow. It took 10 years for the technology to mature.

The 2004 Walmart mandate drove a billion dollars of investment into the RFID industry, and that infusion helped us get to where we did by 2010, when we were able to move into new markets. The focus in the retail industry has been on the item level since 2010. We’ve seen a maturity of technology pricing models and most importantly, maturity on return on investment (ROI). Now it is just a matter of when more retailers and brands will adopt the technology.


Printed Electronics Now: How is RFID being used to help combat inventory shrinkage and theft?

Dean Frew: There are a number of components that drive shrink. We have numerous examples of shrink being reduced by more than 90% because of RFID. If you know what is in the store on Monday and it is no longer there on Tuesday but it wasn’t sold, then you know there is internal shrink. We also know the history of an item, and if it is stolen, we can tell you where it was when it was in the store, and we also help the police convict thieves.

Return fraud has become a huge concern – people are grabbing stuff off of the shelf and trying to return it for credit. We showed at NRF that items can be shown to have never been sold. We have one retailer who found they had $1.5 million in fake returns. It’s one of the fastest growing theft components of shrink in stores causing retailers to die from a thousand needle pricks.


Printed Electronics Now: One change I’ve noticed in the industry is that many major players have launched cloud platforms. How is this integrated within SML’s offerings to customers?

Dean Frew: We developed our Clarity™ platform over 15 years ago and for the last 13 years our store solution has been based on a 2-tier Cloud architecture using Microsoft Azure®.

We have utilized this event-driven cloud architecture to scale over 7,000 stores live and it reliably performs 250 million to 500 million RFID item reads per week executing numerous inventory and operational use cases within the store. There are a lot of things we have learned by working with some of the world’s top retail brands to get our architecture to the current level of performance and reliability. A cloud-based architecture provides us with dramatically higher performance, service and support capability. Our Clarity Store and Customer experience products are entirely cloud-based, and our Supply Chain product is a mix of on-prem and cloud. Clarity is a completely proprietary project – our customers can use it as an interface for customers, who can then adapt it. 


Printed Electronics Now: The Digital Product Passport (DPP) idea is being implemented as a way to ensure that there is transparency in a product’s life cycle. Is this an area that SML is developing?

Dean Frew: One way to think of the digital product passport requirements is that it is an extension of item level transformation where every item has a unique identifier. What’s happening now is that our partnerships with companies like EON are leading the way to pull all of this together. RFID helps manage technology and DPP looks at the history and brand to consumer connectivity; to us it is a natural extension. We see ourselves as being a part of the DPP intersection.


Printed Electronics Now: What are some of the new opportunities you are seeing for RFID?

Dean Frew: One of the new opportunities is in logistics. For example, we have demonstrated with one retailer that we can monitor what is in a truck and what is left in the truck. This is the problem that FedEx and UPS are trying to solve; the last mile challenge is one of the next waves.

Food traceability is another opportunity. The real focus of food traceability is being able to manage a first-in, first-out model so you end up with less food waste. The second model is if something happened to a food product in terms of contamination. The retailer needs to track that product. They would need to know where the product is by a lot so they can trace and pick the items and get them thrown away. We are leveraging our mature architecture to offer traceability and inventory control to the food market. 


Printed Electronics Now: Do you see self-checkout as an opportunity for RFID?

Dean Frew: Anything associated with checkout and changing its process, where you are no longer using a barcode and using a one-to-one transaction but are able to read the items faster, is definitely something we are investing heavily in. We demonstrated at NRF how a person at a store can have the items in a basket, and they can just swipe their card. We think there is a lot of innovation in checkout that will be coming.


Printed Electronics Now: What is your outlook for the RFID business going forward?

Dean Frew: Some retailers today have a real problem, in that they depend on their inventory remaining accurate after a once-a-year physical count. The reality is that their inventory accuracy is less than 70% after nine months. That’s why the use of RFID is perfect for this. There is no way to fix this problem other than to put more labor into it, and that’s the opposite way retailers are going.

RFID is the next step. We expect dramatic growth in RFID usage over the next 10 to 15 years. This is the way that retailers are going to adopt RFID technology. Our business is driven by hard returns on investment – did we improve customer satisfaction; did we improve their sales? This is what we are trying to do. People have been talking about RFID forever, and retailers are showing the returns to their investors. We have 7,000 stores that see it every day.