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Consumer product goods companies could rely on radio frequency identification (RFID) to pull a few new strings if Ed Matthews has his way. The IT director for Wilson Sporting Goods says the Amer Sports subsidiary has been tossing around the idea of embedding radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in professional tennis rackets used in sporting events.
Wilson supplies tennis rackets to the U.S. Open. Embedding a tag on the racket would make it easier to track and log equipment maintenance. "When someone at the U.S. open drops off a racket it would identify the owner and how we strung it," Matthews says. "This means we wouldn't need to track it manually."
Some IT managers may cringe at the thought of deploying a RFID project that doesn't come with a mandate from Wal-Mart Stores, Target, Best Buy, Metro Group, or the host of other retailers dabbling in the technology.
Meeting Wal-Mart Stores RFID compliance may be daunting for most, but not for Matthews. He launched a similar initiative at Pacific Cycle before leaving the bike maker more than two years ago to spearhead efforts at Wilson.
And as good luck would have it, parent company Amer began upgrading its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system around the same time Wilson's shipping operations had to meet Wal-Mart mandates. The company took on the challenge with Matthews at the helm.
Wilson runs Auto ID Infrastructure (AII), SAP's interface for connecting software to RFID, bar code, sensor, and other data collection systems. The information pushes through a set of rules in AII, which supports XML. Through the platform, Wilson can create XML smart labels and load them onto the Zebra R110Xi printer/encoders to label shipments. The project interfaces with an IBM AS/400 host that integrates software.
Matthews estimates getting the RFID project up and running cost about $150,000 to $250,000. The company uses 200,000 RFID tags annually on boxes of baseball gloves, basketballs, tennis rackets and one set of golf clubs shipped to Wal-Mart. Each label costs between 10- and 15-cents each. Aside from the Bentonville retailer, Wilson's products sell through Target, as well as specialty stores Dick's Sporting Goods, and Sports Authority, among others.
It's not a secret that closed-loop applications have the most promise for ROI. "We ship two basketballs in a box to Wal-Mart, so you're not getting a whole lot of return," Matthew says.
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