America Today store

Video

America Today

Ensure item availability, unlock omnichannel

In this video Charlotte den Heijer, Merchandise Planner and Derk Hoogland, Merchandise and Supply Chain Manager at America Today share their experiences of working with Nedap and the benefits of RFID for America Today's daily operations.

Transcript

Charlotte den Heijer: America Today is a fashion retailer that makes clothes for young adults who want to feel confident in their own clothes.

Derk Hoogland: The customer expectation really changed over the years. The expectations are now that they really want to have the store in their pocket.

Charlotte den Heijer: They really want to get the stuff immediately. They want to get it in the store, they want to get it online.

Derk Hoogland: And the biggest challenge for us was to have the stock available and RFID provides that.

Omnichannel these days is crucial. If you don’t know what you have in the store and you can’t guarantee that the stock is there, then you can’t offer services like ship-from-store or click and reserve.

Charlotte den Heijer: Before we got RFID, we did the inventory once in two years. And now we’re doing the inventory once a week. You can do an inventory in one hour and you can scan over 15000 items, which is very awesome. Goods receiving used to take two hours, but now it’s like five seconds.

Derk Hoogland: We selected Nedap because we had a very good experience with them during the pilot phase. They give us the opportunity to be involved in the development of the software and it’s user-friendly.

Charlotte den Heijer: I can just show it to you and you know how to use it right away. We used the train the trainer concept, which basically means that our store managers were teaching the staff to use the iD Cloud App.

Derk Hoogland: And that’s making it possible to do the rollout to 70 stores in only one month.

Charlotte den Heijer: Our staff really wants to use it more often than once a week, because then they can use the refill function, and make sure that everything is on the sales floor. Then the customer comes and gets that specific item you just refilled. And then you got a happy customer!

One thing that’s very nice is that we can use Virtual Shielding.

Derk Hoogland: With ID Cloud Virtual Shielding we don’t have to worry about physical shielding, because it provides the same quality, but without the cost.

Charlotte den Heijer: And now we know exactly where the item is: in the stock room or the sales floor.

Because we got very young people working at our stores, they are very competitive. They want to get the highest accuracy possible, which is very nice. It’s like a competition: which store has the highest accuracy. The stock accuracy is now almost 100%.

We just don’t want to live without RFID in the stores. The stores would hate us if we would remove RFID.

Omnichannel these days is crucial. If you don’t know what you have in the store and you can’t guarantee that the stock is there, you can’t offer services like ship-from-store or click and reserve.

Derk Hoogland – Merchandise and Supply Chain Manager