Californian company Omnitrol Networks announced it has been selected by telecoms firm BT for the deployment of RFID-based retail inventory products.
The solutions that BT will be able to deploy worldwide will track actual inventory movements and item-level velocity by stock keeping unit (SKU). It will deliver proactive real-time replenishment alerts and visibility for retail store managers. This will enable near-perfect tracking accuracy and forecasted inventory levels, which will help retailers to significantly increase employee productivity.<br><br>Keith Sherry, General Manager, Supply Chain Solutions, BT Global Services, said: "Omnitrol’s versatile and distributed architecture in real-time asset management, combined with BT’s experience in providing fully-managed, end-to- end solutions, allows BT to offer retailers a plug-and-play managed solution that is incrementally deployable and scalable."<br><br>"We developed this solution in collaboration with Omnitrol to substantially reduce deployment complexity for our retail customers at the lowest possible cost of ownership, so that they can quickly achieve their return on investment on a store-by-store basis. Retailers can now dramatically simplify many of the manually intensive processes such as receiving, stocking and inventory counting. Our predictive analytics with highly accurate stock-taking allows stores to proactively replenish the sales floor virtually eliminating out-of-stocks. Employees can spend more time servicing customers, rather than looking for inventory which we can now ensure is always at the right place, at the right time, improving customer satisfaction, reducing markdowns, and increasing sales by up to 10 per cent.โ<br><br>Able to be installed and in production within a day when pre-configured, the OMNITROL distributed retail solution provides advanced capabilities such as misplaced articles detection, automated and predictive item-level replenishment alerts, and store-wide inventory reconciliation through real-time reports, alerts and mobile handhelds that help improve operational efficiency in the stores.<br><br>"Improving efficiency, brand protection and reducing out-of-stocks clearly represents some of the biggest challenges faced by retailers, distributors and manufacturers." said Raj Saksena, CEO of Omnitrol Networks. "Our work with BT addresses this problem by delivering a fully managed, distributed asset track and trace solution. The OMNITROL platform continues to prove itself as the industry leader in delivering real-time inventory management and traceability solutions by sharing information accurately and quickly from shop-floor operations which creates a smarter and more collaborative supply-chain."
