First there were the presentations in Frankfurt, then others in New York, for B&N and the Book Industry Study Group, followed by a blitz of press coverage. The subject? The ground-breaking use of item-level RFID tags on all books in a bookstore located on the outskirts of Amsterdam, something that to date has only been done in a number of libraries in North America and the UK. This Dutch initiative, however, may well mark the beginning of a revolution in book retailing, distribution, and warehousing worldwide.
The goals of BGN, the largest bookstore chain in the Netherlands, were not about technology, but rather all about the retail business. Namely to: 1) expand customer self-service, 2) improve inventory accuracy, and most of all, 3) increase sales.
Leap-frogging what was expected to be the first use of RFID tags in book retail – to indicate the contents of cartons, crates and skids – BGN asked its distribution partner, Central Bookhouse, to affix RFID tags on the back cover of all volumes destined for the new store in Almere. In eight months, the program has been so successful that BGN is bringing it to all 16 of its retail stores over the next year. PT (via Lightspeed’s Jim Lichtenberg) recently had an opportunity to visit the store and watch the process live.
Almere is a new bedroom community of 125,000 outside of Amsterdamn. The bookstore is part of a shopping center and sits behind a huge, two-story wall of glass. In a back room, a young staff member picks up a box of 60 books and passes it through a small tunnel in a specially constructed reader – like a car through an EZ Pass toll gate. Irrespective of their orientation inside the box, all titles are read with 100% accuracy in a matter of seconds. Each is simultaneously entered into the store’s main inventory database, and in the event that the book has been ordered by a customer, an SMS message or e-mail is instantly sent directly to the customer indicating that the book is now in the store and ready for pick-up. As many as 1600 books, delivered each morning, can be logged into the store in about 10 minutes.
Once entered into inventory, books are shelved in the appropriate case. Pushing a small cart equipped with a computer, another staff member passes a hand-held reading device along each shelf and promotional table, matching titles to case or table numbers. This data is wirelessly transmitted to the central computer system, available to customers and staff alike. Thus, inventory of some 38,000 books is taken two to three times a week in a couple of hours while the store is open.
When customers use the several kiosks to enter title, authors or subjects, an Amazon-type screen pops up showing the matching title, books by the same author, and books on a similar subject, indicating whether each of these volumes is currently in the store and where. (The POS software continuously updates the inventory and location data as books are sold.) If the title is not available, a screen pops up asking if the customer would like the book to be ordered – special orders alone have increased by 8-10%.
“We never imagined that success would be so quick,” explains Jan Vink, BGN Director, who watches over every aspect of the operation. He has been on his cell phone all morning addressing problems in a new store in Maastricht, the second BGN store to be RFID enabled. “It’s not easy, but so far so good,” notes Vink.
PT thanks Lightspeed’s Jim Lichtenberg for this report.
