CLEOR boasts 49 stores mainly in northern and western France in which it offers customers a new approach to jewellery, as a real fashion accessory, with an extensive range of silver, gold-plated and steel items, in addition to gold pieces and watches.
Innovation has always been a key concern at CLEOR, with marketing innovation, product innovation, but also innovation in logistics. To allow its salespeople to focus on their core business rather than on restrictive and particularly time-consuming rotating inventories, the company has used its sense of innovation to drive its logistics performance by choosing RFID technology to manage its stock. By re-tagging its 800,000 goods with RFID tags and using RFID readers both at the storage centre and in stores, the company has boosted productivity in terms of daily product management, particularly in-store, where stock-taking can now be done without handling the jewellery on display.
CLEOR: a unique concept applied throughout France with major supply chain requirements
CLEOR’s adventure began in 1997 when the first store opened in Cergy Pontoise. The management soon anticipated new trends in the jewellery market and made a decisive change of direction which turned jewellery into a real fashion accessory.
At the end of 2003, the company took over the Goldy stores, then 13 Mathy outlets, taking it to a current total of 49 points of sale, mainly located in the northern part of France. CLEOR has succeeded in attracting and securing the loyalty of dynamic young women who care both about their appearance and their budget. It has also always opted for the most innovative methods for the everyday running of the company. “We strive to keep a permanent lead in terms of products and technologies,” says Aurélien Sénéchal, COO at CLEOR, “we now have a real concept, a strong visual identity rolled out in all our stores and we want to optimize routine stock management both at our storage centre and in our points of sale.”
Indeed, in the jewellery trade, with its very small items and price tags, doing a stock-take or checking deliveries of goods can soon demand a lot of time. Aurélien confirms: “our labels, as is the case in the trade, were very small and sometimes had to be read several times to actually read the barcode properly. Moreover, the very value of the stocks means we need to do a rotating inventory in stores, which meant our salespeople had to handle the jewellery on display and put it back in place in the display cabinets once the barcode was read. Each store has about 10,000 pieces and time spent on the inventory was high. Every time we called at a store, we could always see a salesperson plunging into a display cabinet taking the inventory!”
CLEOR’s gamble: use RFID technology to tag its 800,000 items!
Time spent doing stocktaking is not spent making sales, so the managers turned to RFID technology and made the somewhat crazy gamble of using it to tag its minute products. “We wanted to take more frequent inventories without affecting our sales staff’s work or our product labelling,” explains Aurélien. “We discovered RFID through our competitive intelligence and we realised that it was possible to integrate a chip and an RFID antenna into the price tags to do contactless scanning. We were really impressed by the efficiency and performance of the first tests we did in our show room.” The project then took shape and the idea emerged of equipping the storage centre and the shops with handheld and desktop RFID readers to facilitate stock flows throughout the supply chain.
Thanks to RFID tagging in the warehouse, chips can be encoded at the distribution site, and information consistency and RFID chip activation can be checked. With an RFID tag encoding rate of 99.6%, the TOSHIBA B-SX5 printers provide excellent label print quality for the individual jewellery tagging, thus making lighter, faster work of subsequent inventory and stock management.
The answer from Frequentiel, Toshiba Tec and Psion Teklogix: a tailor-made RFID solution connected to “one of the most powerful terminals in the market”.
Once the tag supplier selected, the right contractor had to be found to implement and customize the solution. A request for proposals was launched and Frequentiel stood out from the crowd: “Contact was very good between the teams; we found them highly motivated and above all, their pricing method was very different from standard market practices,” points out Aurélien. “We have been working together on this project since April 2009 and they have not disappointed us!” At Frequentiel, the team worked to find a solution tailored to CLEOR’s needs, which it soon did: “in addition to developing the software interface between the RFID system and CLEOR’s information system, one of our added values on this project was our ability to design and manufacture tailor-made RFID antennas and racket readers” explains a member of Frequentiel’s management team.
“We’ve designed a tailor-made, lightweight, narrow racket which is not too long so it can easily be moved about in a display cabinet, and we adapted it to Psion Teklogix’s WORKABOUT PRO, which we consider to be the most powerful mobile reader currently on the market. As a result, test results gave 100% successful tag reading in record time!”
And so began the re-tagging of the 800,000 products in stock: TOSHIBA TEC was chosen to do the job. The tags are still very small to remain discreet but now contain an RFID antenna and a chip with a unique identifier. Thanks to the tag, CLEOR’s logistics are completely revolutionized!
0 bind, 100% performance!
Today, be it at the storage centre or in stores, the jewellery no longer needs to be handled to take delivery or dispatch a parcel. “Our jewellery is usually grouped together in physical batches of about a hundred or so items. Before, we had to unpack each item to scan the tag. Now, the operator can instantly read the one hundred products, either by placing them on the RFID desktop reader, or with the WORKABOUT PRO PDA and its RFID antenna,” says Aurélien. The same is true for the rotating inventory. “We don’t have to touch the display cabinets any more to take an inventory of our products! All we do is dip the antenna into the cabinet: every time a new product is read, the reader beeps in confirmation. The speed and accuracy are impressive, particularly as we now apply very stringent merchandising standards to arrange our displays.” And use of RFID does not stop at logistics operations, because even the customers benefit from this gain in productivity when they get to the till.
“In this project, we haven’t made a slight improvement, we’ve made a really big one!”
KINGS (in French :"ROIS") of the SUPPLY CHAIN 2010, CLEOR’s CEO Gilles BENNEJEAN, and COO Aurélien SENECHAL
The stores switched to the new system in November 2009 (i.e. only 8 months after the project began.) “We recorded a very significant increase in productivity,” Frequentiel proudly announces. “In theory, a stock-take which required 4 days with the previous method can now take only 4 hours! And that fully meets our customer’s expectations, as the company wanted to free up its salespeople from painstaking, low-productivity tasks like inventories.” When asked “what will you gain from this new way of working?” Aurélien Sénéchal’s answer is clear: “In this project, we haven’t made a slight improvement, we’ve made a really big one! And there’s more to come, as this first project, the only one of its kind in France, paves the way to a new generation of smart display cabinets!”
About CLEOR
CLEOR’s adventure started in 1997 and was soon a success story. The company anticipated changes in the jewellery market and turned jewellery into real fashion accessories. By 2002, the company had opened 11 stores.
Leveraging its strong growth, CLEOR took over the Goldy stores late 2003 and added 23 new outlets to its existing 16 shops.
In 2007, CLEOR bought out the 13 Mathy stores.
The CLEOR network now boasts 49 points of sale, mainly in the northern part of France.
In just a few years, CLEOR has succeeded in attracting and securing the loyalty of dynamic young customers who care about their appearance and their budget.
More information on: www.cleor.com
About TOSHIBA TEC Europe
TOSHIBA TEC Europe (TERIS) manages product planning, marketing, sales, service support and distribution of point of sale systems, cash registers, scales, barcode printers, peripherals and software information systems throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. As a total solution provider, TOSHIBA TEC Europe offers a complete package from consulting and system design to system installation, operation and maintenance.
Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium TERIS has three divisions: the Retail division; the Auto ID division and the Services division.
TOSHIBA TEC is an independent operating company of Toshiba Corporation, the seventh largest electronics/electrical equipment company and the world's 91st largest company in terms of sales. Ranked by Fortune magazine as the eighth Most Admired Electronics Company in the World, Toshiba Corporation is a world leader in high technology products with more than 300 major subsidiaries and affiliates worldwide. Fiscal year revenue in 2008 was approximately $67.9 billion.
For more information on TOSHIBA TEC point of sale systems, cash registers, scales, barcode printers, peripherals and software information systems, or for a dealer in your area, call +32 2 410 2100 or visit the TERIS web site at www.toshibatec-eu.com.
About FREQUENTIEL
Frequentiel is a service provider specializing in identification and traceability technology, in particular RFID (radio frequency identification).
With its global service offering – Consulting, Engineering and Integration – Frequentiel provides a single point of contact between the customer company and the RFID hardware and software solution providers. Frequentiel handles all the concerns involved in a given RFID project, from the initial opportunity study to rolling out a productive application.
Now that the RFID market has reached a high level of maturity, companies are more than ever seeking global service offerings with commercial impartiality. We have decided to rise to that challenge. Our goal is to drive their RFID projects.
More information on: www.frequentiel.com
