Wal-Mart plan could cost suppliers millions

Some consumer products companies will have to invest millions of dollars to comply with Wal-Mart Stores' drive to have every carton and pallet it receives carry a radio identification tag, according to a report to be released Monday by A.T. Kearney, a consulting firm.

"It's a big item that most of them have not budgeted for," said David Dannon, vice president for the consumer industries and retail products practice at Kearney, a Chicago-based subsidiary of Electronic Data Services.

The technology, known as radio-frequency identification, or RFID, has been used to track containers on trains and ships and in automatic toll systems like E-ZPass or FastTrak. In its new form, it is seen as the long-term successor to bar codes in the retail industry. Radio tags can carry more information about the product, can be scanned more rapidly and can be found even if they are hidden in cartons or behind other products.

Wal-Mart said in June that it expected its top 100 suppliers to adopt the technology by the end of 2004 and the rest of its suppliers to do so in 2005. In late September, the Department of Defense said it would also require major suppliers to use such tags by the end of 2004.

Wal-Mart remains strongly committed to the technology, but last week sounded a more pragmatic note at a meeting it organized to discuss its expectations with suppliers and RFID technology vendors, several people who attended said. Wal-Mart said that it would confine the initial implementation of the technology to three distribution centers and 150 stores in Texas and that it was still considering whether to concentrate first on only a few product categories.

"Wal-Mart recognizes that this is not going to go as fast as they wanted," Dannon said. Wal-Mart, which is based in Bentonville, Ark., declined to comment.

The Kearney report concluded that the technology would save Wal-Mart and other retailers billions of dollars. More precise tracking of supplies could cut the amount of inventory the stores need by 5 percent, and the labor costs of managing inventory in warehouses would fall by 7.5 percent for efficient retailers and even more for those that are not well organized, the report said. Radio tagging should also raise sales by helping stores avoid running out of items.

While the costs to introduce the technology will vary widely, Kearney estimated that major retailers would have to invest $400,000 at each distribution center and $100,000 at each store to read and manage the data. A major chain might have to spend $35 million to $40 million to integrate the information into its reporting systems, which will be needed to gain much of the potential savings.

Costs for the plants and warehouses of big suppliers would be comparable to those for the retailers' distribution centers with one major exception--under Wal-Mart's plan, the manufacturers are to pay the entire cost of buying and applying the tags. A grocery manufacturer with $5 billion in sales could use more than 220 million tags annually, which would cost $33 million at current prices of around 15 cents a tag. If tag prices tumble to 5 cents each as volume grows, the outlay would still be $11 million.

Despite the costs, the better inventory and theft control the tags permit could make the investment profitable for suppliers of relatively high-value items like over-the-counter drugs. But it will be hard for manufacturers of groceries to gain as much return on their investment, particularly if they are already operating efficiently, Dannon said.

Kearney's cost and benefit projections appear conservative to several other experts. Edward Carey, managing director for the consumer business practice at Deloitte, said the labor savings in warehouses would grow to as much as 20 percent.

To get enough data to cut costs substantially, manufacturers need tags that can be rewritten as they move through the supply chain, Carey said. Today's tags are typically read-only devices. Current RFID systems also have trouble reading tags through liquids and metals.

"Some of our clients are saying we are going to drag this out as long as we can," Carey said. Still, getting on the wrong side of Wal-Mart is not widely viewed as an option.