April 4, 2005

SBT (scan-based trading) allows retailers and suppliers to share a fair amount of information pertaining to forecasts, item data, promotions data, and so forth.

Rite-Aid, a customer of SBT specialist Prescient, has just completed an SBT pilot with its suppliers. According to Betsy Hargus, director of marketing at Prescient, Rite-Aid has thereby realized a 32 percent decrease in out-of-stocks.

Lowering out-of-stocks is a stated driver behind Wal-Mart radio frequency identification (RFID) project, so it's pretty intuitive to compare SBT and RFID in this respect. Hargus explains that, at heart, both initiatives are about obtaining and sharing data -- "only, with RFID, there's a lot more data about items and item movement."

With this trade-off in mind, SBT has the advantage of being built on less expensive technology. "The spending isn't as one-sided as RFID appears to be," says Karen Sickles, director of delivery and advanced commerce services for Prescient, referring to RFID's supplier-side cost burden.

Prescient also claims to take even more cost out of the picture by hosting key capabilities for suppliers. "We can be their system."

Source: Line 56