Members News
G&P Net has chosen Aton as strategic consultant to realize an innovative and complete solution, utilizing radio frequency technology to guarantee logistics processes optimization and control of the ?grey market?, a phenomenon which is not so well-known as the black market, but often more worrying and harder to manage, consisting in the distribution of original garments through distribution channels non authorized by the trademark owner.
The solution is provided by Aton?s onID middleware, software allowing RFID system management on the whole, decoding data and making them available to users, and by 6 gates for the reading of both hanging and lying garments, featuring high-performance readers with antennas. The integration of onID and onLog, the solution for Warehouse Management realized by Aton in 2007, contributes to consolidate previous results in the Logistics sphere, translating into significant time and labour reduction.
Aton?s technological partner is Alien Technology, worldwide leader in tag and UHF reader production, which has also provided the inlay tags to label every garment.
?The initial target of our collaboration was to optimize logistics, but RFID technology has allowed us to go further, allowing us to guarantee complete traceability from production to distribution, in defence of the trademark and the investment,? ? assures Mr. Otello Azzali, Aton Vice-President ? ?The strong point of our solution has been the easiness as well as the readiness of the RFID technology implementation: in less than one month both the laboratory test phase and the project set-in-motion ? even with tag insertion for certain models ? have been carried out.?
?We didn?t have adequate control on our distribution channels or on the grey market,? ? states Mr. Luca Isidori, ICT Manager at G&Pnet ? ?Now we have 100% supply chain and channel management control and can make inventory checks in just a fraction of the time. The greater transparency significantly reduces out-of-stocks which leads to better sales turnover in a win-win logic.?
The results of the project confirm the data from the analysis on the diffusion of radio frequency technology in the Italian fashion production that took place between January and May 2009 at Cedites ((Centro Studi per la Divulgazione della Tecnologia e della Scienza) with Aton?s contribution. The use of RFID, if implemented correctly, can in fact lead to out-of-stocks reduction from 10 to 30%, to labour cost reduction from 5 to 10% and to theft and fraud reduction from 10 to 20%. The defence of the ?Made in Italy? trademark can find decisive driving force in the potential offered by this technology at a cost enterprises can easily cope with and providing high return-on-investment.
