There were a couple of interesting RFID news stories this week: Macy’s Says RFID Accuracy Enables New Inventory Strategy It’s a concept that Macy’s has been promoting for a while, but this week there were additional news reports relative to the department store chain’s Pick to the Last Unit (P2LU) strategy for Omnichannel order fulfillment. The basic idea is simple: as retailers move to store-based fulfillment for on-line and mobile orders – a strategy Macy’s has aggressively pursued in recent years – they have been reluctant to peg a given store to fill an order if the quantity shown in the perpetual inventory system is low. Why? Because store perpetual inventories are notoriously inaccurate, risking that the item could not be found for shipment after the order was accepted. Macy’s has been an aggressive adopter of item-level RFID, driven it seems primarily by its interest in using store-level fulfillment. In 2013, for example, a senior Macy’s executive noted that ""We’re extremely excited about the accuracy that this is going to bring to our business, because having the exact volume – exact quantity of product in the stores when we think we have it – will be a huge sales driver," especially for ecommerce. (See Macy’s Gives Update on Its RFID Rollout and Plans, Connects RFID and Multi-Channel Commerce .) Macy’s has been rolling out its RFID program product by product, department by department. For example, in early 2014 Macy’s reported it was using RFID on all shoe displays at 850 stores, which had allowed it to increase shoe display compliance with the planogram from 65-70% to nearly 100%. With the RFID program’s success and resulting confidence in its store inventories, Macy’s will now allocate inventory for on-line orders even if the system shows that just one unit is available […]