One of the most useful applications of RFID in retail is to track inventory. For example, when merchandise arrives at the store, RFID readers can be used to read what arrived and update the store’s inventory system. If a fixed RFID reader is used at the door of the stockroom, it can also automatically detect when an employee takes the merchandise from the stockroom and takes it to the showroom, updating the inventory system accordingly. And when the merchandise is sold, scanning it at the checkout can trigger an action to replenish stock so the store does not run out of that product. The obvious benefit of a system like this is to always know what’s in the inventory and to help prevent stockouts.

Tracking inventory at the store level is just one aspect of inventory management, of course. RFID is also commonly used to track what’s coming in and out of the warehouse and where it is being stored. For example, merchandise can quickly be counted using RFID readers as it getting unloaded from a truck arriving from the supplier to the warehouse; it can be scanned with the aisle and bin number where it will be stored, and again it can be counted when it is being loaded onto a truck to be shipped to the store. For the retail security all these activities can be logged in the inventory system, helping the warehouse management stay up-to-date on the merchandise coming and going.

Many retailers don’t have full-blown RFID systems that can track merchandise on an individual level at the store for retail security. The reason often has to do with the cost and complexity of deploying such a system for thousands of different SKUs in hundreds of stores. So, they may still track their inventory the old-fashioned way: by manual counts and using barcodes. Since this is very time-consuming, these retailers will perform full inventory checks only periodically, leading to long periods when the inventory system may not accurately reflect what’s actually in the store. Things do disappear in retail security!

A simplified RFID system can help in retail security, however – the one that uses just RFID tags, labels, and readers, and sans the database for individual items. Say you have a display of shirts of the same design, and they have RFID labels on them. A store associate can easily wave a handheld RFID reader off the display and instantly count how many shirts are on it. This is called a cycle count and can be performed at the end of every day to verify stock. If at the start of the day the store had 30 shirts, and the POS system says that five were sold, then the reader should be able to count 25 shirts on that display. If there are fewer, that means the store had a loss either from shoplifting, administrative error, or another source. The benefit of cycle counting is to be able to frequently check the stock, not just every once in a while, as is common with manual counts, and to have a more accurate idea of what’s in the store and what left it.

零售商通常安全使用电子文章surveillance (EAS) systems at the doors to detect shoplifting attempts. An RFID system can be used the same way. In fact, RFID antennas designed for store entrances may look exactly the same as EAS antennas, and some incorporate both technologies. An RFID system at the door can detect RFID labels or tags that are leaving the store, and can issue alerts to store associates, just like an EAS system.

Why would a store want to switch to RFID for loss prevention rather than stick with EAS? Retailers that decide to do this are already migrating to wider adoption of RFID for inventory management, so since the merchandise will have RFID tags and labels, why duplicate by also having EAS tags and labels? Another reason may be to stay ahead of the technological curve. EAS systems age and need to be replaced at some point. Rather than replace them with other EAS systems, some retailers replace them with RFID systems because they anticipate a wider use of RFID in their operations in the future, even if it is limited today. When RFID is used to perform EAS functions it is, unsurprisingly, known as RFID as EAS.