Impinj has announced the first solutions in its retail portfolio, built in collaboration with partners Detego, Nedap and InMotion. Based on the Impinj platform, the end-to-end solutions are designed to help retailers improve store operations, the customer experience and sales.

Impinj is offering the Retail Inventory Intelligence and Supply Chain Management solution (developed with Detego), the Always-On Retail Inventory Intelligence solution (developed with Nedap), and the Interactive, Digital Product Displays for Retail Stores and Consumer Brands solution (developed with InMotion). All three solutions are built on the Impinj platform, which leverages RAIN RFID and comprises endpoints (tag chips that uniquely identify items), connectivity (readers and gateways that wirelessly identify the items) and software. Impinj says it plans to continue adding solutions to its retail portfolio, as well as introduce portfolios for other industries.

The Impinj-Detego solution delivers item-level article management and in-store analytics through real-time supply chain visibility. The solution delivers insights to store managers regarding merchandise flow and product availability, allowing them to minimize markdowns. For example, Impinj reports, it can help apparel companies receive accurate inventory information and track goods from the point of manufacturing to the point of sale, resulting in increased delivery accuracy, fewer mis-shipments, reduced processing costs and improved inventory accuracy, thereby leading to more sales. The Retail Inventory Intelligence solution features Impinj's ItemSense software, used in conjunction with Impinj's xArray RAIN RFID readers. Unveiled earlier this month (see With ItemSense, Impinj Aims to Simplify 'Always On' RFID Deployments), ItemSense is designed to make EPC RAIN RFID solutions simpler to deploy, by facilitating the integration of an xArray RFID deployment with an end user's existing inventory-management system or other enterprise software.

The Impinj-Nedap solution is designed to continuously count and reconcile store inventory levels. The Impinj platform and Nedap !D Cloud application work together to provide retailers with around-the-clock inventory updates that can be reconciled with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The solution is simple to use, leverages cloud-based software and can help increase store sales with improved inventory visibility, lower labor costs and operational inefficiencies from manual cycle counts and undirected replenishment. The system can also eliminate the excess inventory that stores traditionally employ to compensate for inaccurate inventory visibility, according to Impinj.

The Impinj-Nedap Always-On Retail Inventory Intelligence solution includes RAIN-tagged products as endpoints (with Impinj Monza 6 or better chips recommended), the Impinj xArray gateway as the connectivity layer, Impinj's ItemSense software and ItemSense /!D Cloud Connector, and Nedap's !D Cloud solution. Impinj's ItemSense / !D Cloud Connector provides two primary responsibilities. The first is coordinating ItemSense jobs in support of the retailer’s goals. This means the connector runs optimized ItemSense jobs around a store's schedule, tuned to such objectives as inventory and location accuracy. The second function is data integration, achieved by pulling endpoint information from ItemSense and pushing that information to !D Cloud. The connector also performs required data transformation, such as mapping ItemSense zones to !D Cloud zones.

The Impinj-InMotion solution delivers interactive visual displays that engage customers, help convert product sales and give visibility into shopper behavior, Impinj reports. The display solution can be integrated with existing product-information-management (PIM) systems, and also provides monitoring to improve suggestive selling and conversion factors. The Interactive, Digital Product Displays solution combines InMotion's displays with Impinj'sR420 and R220 fixed RAIN RFID readers, Brickyard near-field reader antenna and Mini-Guardrail Antenna (specifically designed for item-level performance), as well as InMotion's Edge Device Compact computing device that hosts InMotion software, the InMotion Remote Management Network and RAIN RFID tags.