Eren Holding installs Alien RFID garment tracking system

17 Feb '09

4 min read

Alien Technology proudly announces its fifth multi-million tag RFID garment tracking installation in Europe, this time with Eren Holding of Istanbul, Turkey. Alien once again teamed up with its preferred retail specialist partner in Eastern Europe, STS, a member of Alien Technology's highly-acclaimed Value Added Solutions Provider (VASP) channel partner network, to provide a complete end-to-end RFID traceability solution in the garment sector.

The enduser, Eren Holding, is a diversified conglomerate which manufactures and distributes high-end garments, with such prestigious brand names as Lacoste, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Coach and Blank. Eren Holding operates 88 dedicated fashion retail stores throughout Turkey, and manufactures and distributes close to 2 million garments per year. Eren Holding had a need to enhance its supply chain traceability process and reduce inventory control/labor costs, so it approached the Alien integrator, STS for a complete hardware and Oracle based software solution.

Explains Arif Yaratan, marketing manager for STS: “Eren Holding is one of the most prestigious retailers in Turkey, and distributes Lacoste, Burberry, Calvin Klein and Coach brands, throughout Turkey and Russia, so it was an honor to handle such a high profile manufacturer/retailer of such well established clothing brands.

Eren Holding manufactures more than 1 million Lacoste clothing articles per year – jackets, shirts, shorts – in addition to importing hundreds of thousands of similar articles from such leading fashion designers as Calvin Klein, Burberry and Coach. Eren Holding's main objective in adopting RFID was to provide 100 percent traceability of the clothing articles, from the manufacturing site to the distribution centers, and, finally, to the retail outlet.”

Adds Stephen Crocker, director sales/channels EMEA for Alien: “Eren Holding chose our high performance ALR-8800 readers, with Intelligent Tag Radar (ITR) functionality, for tracking the tagged garments as they leave the production floor. Up to 500 tagged articles can be packed in a shipping box, and our 8800 reader can read all 500 tagged items instantaneously, which translates into huge labor and time savings since the boxes need not be opened and each article individually scanned – as was the case in the past using bar coding. Eren Holding attaches one of Alien's Higgs 2 M to each Lacoste item at the production level and 2 x 2 tags for all other brands. The reason for using two different Alien tags is that various articles already had a different hang tag form factor.”

Continues Arif: “What made the installation seamless was the wide variety of EPC compliant Gen 2 Alien inlays to choose from – Alien offers diverse inlay form factors which could be easily integrated into Eren Holding's existing hang tag labels. In addition to Alien hardware, STS has provided a complete Oracle based software solution which provides Eren Holding with complete traceability of the tagged articles from the point of manufacture to inventory control at the retail level.”

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