New Research Highlights Critical Importance of RFID Technology to Ensure Inventory Accuracy and Enable Unified Commerce

Tyco Retail Solutions partnered with several industry groups to examine the value of RFID technology to help ensure inventory accuracy and enable store-level fulfillment. This new research validates the use of RFID to combat inventory distortion and increase inventory accuracy and visibility as the essential foundation for today's unified commerce.

IHL Group's study, Retail's Inventory Distortion Problem: Sizing it all up, spotlights the enormous global inventory distortion problem for retailers today. This combination of out-of-stocks (OOS) and overstocks is an estimated $1.1 trillion problem for the retail industry1. Because of this issue, retailers lack confidence in their availability to promise on-hand stock and, as a result, are cautious in leveraging all item quantities for online sales and store fulfillment options such as buy online, pick-up in store (BOPIS). The risk to the customer experience is too high and the average loss of 8.7% of total sales due to inaccuracy is too much.


The key to offering various fulfillment options is having visibility into the true real-time inventory in every store enabled through item-level RFID. Adopting this technology and regular cycle counting processes helps retailers to prevent inventory distortion and can increase inventory accuracy up to 99% and maintain it at 95-99%⁴. With enhanced inventory accuracy, the number of shoppers who can find the inventory they want can increase sales by 5% to 25%⁵.