JD Sports reaches 98% on-shelf availability across its UK and Ireland estate with an RFID rollout sourced, configured and delivered by Renovotec.
Overview
JD Sports has built its reputation over 45 years, growing into a network of close to 5,000 stores across 46 countries and stocking trainers, sportswear and apparel from brands including Nike, Adidas and New Balance.
As the retailer’s UK and Ireland estate expanded, its ability to see what sat on the shelf hadn’t kept up with the pace of the business.
JD Sports needed to know exactly what stock each store held, in real time. They worked with Renovotec and Zebra to source, configure and deploy a fleet of RFID-enabled mobile computers across 414 stores.
The Challenge
“Inventory was always an approximate model, allowing us an educated guess at most”
DANIEL MCGRATH – Head of Customer Operations, JD Sports
For years, JD Sports worked from an inventory model built on estimates rather than certainty.
Head office set a target stock level for each store, the supply chain shipped against it and the system tracked movement through picks, receipts, sales and refunds.
Any missed step in that chain opened a gap between what the system recorded and what actually sat on the shelf and that gap widened the busier and larger a store became.
The knock-on effect directly impacted customers.
A product could show as available when it had already sold, so a store never reordered it, and an online order would arrive with nothing in stock to fulfil it.
JD Sports had been covering these gaps by rerouting orders or pushing for faster delivery, but with rising demand for services like one-hour click-and-collect, that approach had reached its limit.
According to McGrath, “To be able to offer services like one-hour click-and-collect, or 30-minute delivery, our stock count needs to be accurate. Uncertainty becomes the main obstacle standing between us and the experience we want to offer.”
The retailer needed an accurate, real-time stock count that any associate could use without extra training, rolled out to a single standard across a large and growing estate, and built to support the omnichannel services JD Sports planned to introduce in the years ahead.
The Solution
Renovotec’s approach
Trialling the right hardware. Working alongside JD Sports and Zebra, Renovotec supported a five-store pilot that ran identical software across three vendors’ devices side by side.
Zebra’s hardware read tags faster and at a greater range than the alternatives. It also held up better to daily handling on the shop floor, so it became the standard for the rollout.
Sourcing and configuring at volume. Renovotec sourced, configured and delivered the Zebra TC2 Series Mobile Computers and RFD40 RFID sleds that JD Sports needed, in line with an ambitious rollout schedule.
Matching delivery to the pace of the rollout. JD Sports moved from sign-off to its first live store in 76 working days, then expanded at an average of 26 stores a week.
Getting devices configured and into the right stores at that pace meant Renovotec’s delivery schedule had to track the rollout plan exactly, store for store, week by week.
Supporting a new way of working. With devices in hand, store teams could clip an RFD40 sled onto a TC2 mobile computer and walk the floor and stockroom, building a live stock count as they went.
What used to take ten people a full eight hours now takes one colleague around 25 minutes, freeing stores to count twice a week rather than once a quarter.
“When you’re rolling out RFID across more than 400 stores in just three months, there’s no margin for error. We aligned our sourcing and delivery strategy with JD Sports’ store-by-store go-live schedule, ensuring the technology was in place exactly when each location needed it.” Laurence Baxendale – Account Manager, Renovotec
The Technology
Stores were equipped with Zebra TC2 Series Mobile Computers paired with RFD40 RFID sleds, giving associates a single handheld device that could sweep rails and shelves and log every tagged item in range.
Checkpoint’s ItemOptix software brought that data together into one view of inventory across the estate.
Zebra OneCare cover meant a damaged or worn device could be swapped out at no cost, rather than leaving a store short of the kit it needed to keep counting.
The Results
With real-time stock visibility in place across 414 stores, JD Sports has changed how its teams work and how confidently the business can promise stock to its customers:
- On-shelf availability now stands at 98%, so if a size is in the building, a customer can find it on the shop floor.
- Replenishment runs 20% faster, keeping fast-selling sizes moving from stockroom to shelf.
- Colleagues move 95% more items than under the process.
- Completion rates on orders only one store can fulfil have climbed by 4 to 8%.
- A stock count that used to tie up 10 people for 8 hours now takes 1 colleague around 25 minutes for an average store, and around an hour for JD Sports’ largest branch, the 60,000 square foot Trafford Centre store.
- 414 stores across the UK and Ireland went live within three months of the first store launch.
- Teams can spot potential loss as it happens, rather than waiting for a 90 or 180 day audit to reveal it.
With the rollout complete, JD Sports has a foundation for its next phase of work: RFID-enabled self-checkouts, smart fitting rooms, and overhead readers capable of turning unknown loss into known loss.
The same real-time visibility Renovotec helped put in place gives JD Sports the confidence to build new customer experiences too, from phone-based in-store journeys to AI-assisted shopping tools that need to know a product is genuinely on the shelf.
McGrath ends with his opinion of the outome, “Things just land and work. Colleagues open a box, turn it on, and they’re up and running, and that lets our teams spend their time where it matters most, with the customer.”
