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Kimberly-Clark Brings RFID Promotional Expertise to ESCA
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Jun 18, 2007, 11:47

What is Kimberly-Clark doing in Hollywood?  The Dallas-based global  health and hygiene company is considered a world leader in RFID implementation at retail, and it will be sharing its experiences in improving its promotional display executions with the home video community as part of the Day One, RFID panel at ESCA on June 27. 

With operations in 37 countries, Kimberly-Clark’s global brands are sold in more than 150 countries, selling a customer base of 1.3 billion people well-known family care and personal care brands such as Kleenex, Scott, Andrex, Huggies, Pull-Ups, Kotex, Poise and Depend in more than 80 countries.  

Phil Therrien, Manager Customer Supply Chain Strategy & Development for the company, currently leads Kimberly-Clark’s RFID implementation effort, including operational process and business case development. The efforts of the K-C RFID team to improve the timely execution of its promotional displays using RFID technology was recently the subject of a cover story for RFID Journal, and it is a topic that Therrien believes is particularly relevant to the DVD category. 

K-C's recent RFID success story may seem "out of the box" for those selling entertainment but, in fact, it is particularly relevant to those DVD companies that spend small fortunes on POS displays and new product marketing, only to find out that their efforts failed to be fully executed at retail. 

"We have displays that are timed to hit the stores at the beginning of every month, when senior citizens get their Social Security checks and it is essential that we drive the timeliness of execution of these promotions to coincide with these dates.  By tagging our displays with RFID and managing the information, we have been able to measure a quantifiable increase in sales and an improvement in display execution by as much as 20 percent," Therrien explains. 

The K-C RFID program began with a pilot study that involved displays at Wal-Mart and utilized the services of middle-ware supplier OATSystems, which is a Silver Sponsor of this year's ESCA Conference.  The team was able to track, nearly in real time, where the displays were in the supply chain and where and when they are being deployed on the retail floor, providing feedback to the K-C field force, which could then react and take action in order for the promotional displays to hit the stores on the day and date when the promotions were set to occur.  With the success of their RFID promotions initiative, K-C is now beginning to manage in-stocks at shelf levels using RFID. 

According to Therrien, the company has built out applications around RFID tags on corrugate, that lets them track the movement of their cases from the distribution centers and onto the sales floor.  This is an early indication for Therrien that RFID tagging at the case level will ultimately have a pay-off for K-C, though, as paper products, he doubts that item-level tagging will show an ROI for quite some time.  

K-C has been working on its corporate-wide RFID initiative for six years. And though, at first, Therrien admits the company had "unrealistic expectations about how fast this technology would be adopted across retail, we are now seeing real value from using the technology today. 

"We have built out a number of applications that leverages this EPC data stream that we didn't have insight into before and that lets us take action that helps us drive sales. There was a void back when those applications didn't exist.  And with new software and new tags, retailers and suppliers are just starting to see results and real value.  It will take time but we are at the beginning of something very big."



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