09-03-10 15:29
Age: 145 days

The Auto-ID Lab St. Gallen / Zürich has won the “EHI Science Award for Cooperation 2010”, awarded by the EHI Retail Institute.

EHI Science Award for Cooperation 2010 for the best cooperation given to the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen (ITEM-HSG, Auto-ID Labs St. Gallen / Zürich)

The Institute for Technology Management of the University of St. Gallen (ITEM-HSG, Auto-ID Labs St. Gallen / Zürich, Switzerland) was awarded with the “EHI Science Award for Cooperation 2010”. The prize awards the best cooperation between research institutes and the retail sector, which developed new cooperative approaches for the members of the retail value chain. The prestigious prize is endowed with EUR 20.000 and is awarded by the EHI Retail Institute e.V., the ECR Academic Alliance and by GS1 Germany. The EHI Retail Institute is a scientific institute of the retail industry. The 500 members of EHI include international retail companies and their associations, manufacturers of consumer goods and capital goods, and various service providers. In the context of the prize ceremony, which took place on the occasion of the “Retail Innovation Day” and the Annual Conference of the ECR Academic Alliance during the EuroCIS 2010 fair in Düsseldorf, more than 300 representatives from the retail sector in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland were present.

The ITEM-HSG institute at the University of St. Gallen is part of a network of Auto-ID labs across the world that initiated the EPCglobal organization and continues to work closely with GS1 on research and standards development. The team members Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch (ITEM-HSG and ETH Zürich), Prof. Dr. Frédéric Thiesse(University of Würzburg, formerly ITEM-HSG), and Jasser Al-Kassab (ITEM-HSG/Auto-ID Labs St. Gallen / Zürich, University of Cambridge/Auto-ID Labs Cambridge, and SAP Research CEC St. Gallen) accepted the award.

The project was conducted between the ITEM-HSG and the Metro Group between September 2007 and September 2009. The objective of the project was to assess the business value of RFID technology in the retail industry. It was conducted based on an RFID apparel department store trial within the Metro Group Future Store Initiative. For that purpose, a department store was equipped with hundreds of antennae and RFID readers, for example, at different chokepoints, in shelves, in fitting rooms, and at the point of sales. This infrastructure enabled the team to record during 16 months, the movement of more than 100.000 item-level tagged clothing items on their way from the goods issue in the distribution center, on the back store of the department store, and on its sales floor.

The project went beyond a classical feasibility study. The results show that RFID technology not only offers potential for the optimization of operational processes, such as inventory taking or bulk checkout at the POS, but that it offers novel insights and hence potential for improvement in the areas of category management, store layout management, and inventory management. Retailers can derive important conclusions from information, such as how often a pair of pants is tried on without being purchased. Moreover, undetected intransparencies can be made visible in the area of in-store processes and new knowledge about customer behavior on the sales floor can be obtained. Thus, RFID technology is not a mere barcode replacement, but it allows for a much higher visibility along the whole supply chain and makes in-store processes and customer behavior measureable.

The ITEM-HSG institute competed against 6 other top-class research institutions. However, the selection of the jury was finally made concordantly. The pivotal criteria were “innovative power of the idea”, the “scientific and practical relevance of the cooperation”, the “relevance for the supply chain”, and the “balance of the insights for both, academia and practice”. From a research perspective, the project was also the basis top-ranked journal, conference, and book chapter contributions.

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