TOSHIBA TEC Europe, leading retail and industrial automation solutions provider, today announced a strategic partnership with METRO Group to offer an RFID solution for their Future Store Initiative.
METRO Group, Europes premier trading and retailing group, drives the Future Store Initiative cooperation project with SAP and Intel as well as other partners from the information technology and consumer goods industries. The Future Store Initiative is a platform for technical and process-related developments and innovations in retailing, aimed at setting standards for retailing that can be implemented on an international scale.
RFID is a strategic technology for the future of retail, allowing wireless transmission of information for product identification. This new technology delivers huge advantages to the retailer, including uninterrupted traceability of the merchandise within the supply chain, optimisation of order management as well as enhanced product availability.
Retail stores under the Future Store Initiative utilise Toshibas B-SX range of printers. The B-SX range of printers can be easily updated using a standard Toshiba RFID kit; data can then be encoded onto smart labels using RFID transponders of different standards and frequencies. These Toshiba printers have an innovative new feature - .an integrated feature head-up function. This unique feature raises the printer head above the delicate microchip exactly at the moment when a message is being written on a RFID transponder label. This pioneering design feature allows retail shops longer MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of the shops printer and zero-chance of damage to the microchip on the label.
Under the Future Store Initiative, METRO Group was one of the first retailing companies to successfully test RFID jointly with the partners of the Initiative. All Metro stores, including Metro Cash & Carry, Real and Kaufhof outlets will have RFID solutions installed. In future, METRO Group will use RFID technology throughout the complete supply chain process.
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