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Guidance for RFID Store Inventory on AWS

Overview

This Guidance helps retail companies implement smart inventory management with Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) using AWS services. Retailers can place RFID tags on items that emit signals to RFID readers, which are then processed to generate near real-time data related to stock, transactions, inventory levels, or purchase order history for individual customers. Implementing RFID can improve the customer experience, reduce operational cost, and enable retailers to make informed decisions while planning. This Guidance includes four separate architectures showing how to use RFID for managing, counting, and identifying store inventory and for detecting inventory loss. 

How it works

Managing Inventory

This is a logical architecture showing RFID integration of retail store inventory systems using AWS services. It shows the foundational components and flows needed to monitor, maintain, and act on product inventory data.

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating an AWS-based RFID store inventory management solution, showing how RFID scanners in retail stores interact with various AWS services including AWS IoT Core, Lambda, DynamoDB, AppSync, Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon S3, and EventBridge for inventory ingestion, analytics, event processing, and global inventory management.

Counting Inventory

This is a logical end-to-end architecture for RFID integration in a retail store that uses AWS services to perform inventory reconciliation.

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating an RFID-based retail store inventory management system using AWS services, including AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon ECS Anywhere, and Amazon DynamoDB for data ingestion, processing, and inventory management.

Identifying Inventory

This is a logical end-to-end architecture for RFID integration in a retail store that uses AWS services when product details and recommendations need to be returned to a customer.

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating an AWS-based RFID store inventory solution, featuring components such as Amazon Route 53, AWS WAF, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, AWS AppSync, AWS Lambda, Amazon Personalize, AWS Glue, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS, showing the flow from RFID tag scanning to inventory, product recommendations, and event tracking.

Detecting Shrink

This is a logical end-to-end architecture for RFID integration in a retail store that uses AWS services to prevent and detect asset loss.

Download the architecture diagram
Architecture diagram illustrating an RFID-based store inventory shrink detection solution using AWS services. The flow includes a retail store with point of sale, RFID reader, in-store IMS, AWS IoT Greengrass, and alarms, connected to an AWS Cloud setup with DynamoDB, Lambda, IoT Core, Amazon Athena, EventBridge, SNS, and QuickSight, enabling real-time inventory tracking, event processing, loss prevention, and security team alerts.

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

You can set a workload baseline by using business events collected by RFID scanners or readers, log and metrics from Amazon CloudWatch, and any ancillary or supporting data from other business applications. You can then perform continuous monitoring of these metrics for anomalies or drift (through automation) and set up notifications that alert the right personnel of drift.


Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper

You can enable least-privilege access through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles during interactions between AWS services. All services in this Guidance are patched to help ensure minimal security vulnerabilities.

Read the Security whitepaper

To maintain reliable connection to the internet for this Guidance, you should implement best practices in your infrastructure, particularly for services such as AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, and API Gateway. These services are highly available and use underlying protocols to ensure delivery and security. AWS IoT Core can provide reliable message delivery using MQTT quality of service. Retail stores can be configured to use AWS IoT Greengrass, allowing for offline IoT processing until connectivity is restored.


Read the Reliability whitepaper

This Guidance uses an event-driven architecture based on a publish-subscribe model. This model enables you to incorporate additional services without impacting the architecture’s core functionality. To achieve low latency, you should consider your geographical proximity to users and systems that will interact with this Guidance.


Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper

The Guidance uses serverless services, which allows you to pay only for the resources you use. For additional cost savings, you can use provisioned capacity for DynamoDB and S3 Intelligent-Tiering for automatic cost savings.


Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper

By processing as much as possible in the cloud, this Guidance keeps hardware requirements to a minimum. In the event that connectivity to AWS is lost, some on-premises hardware is necessary to support operations. Hardware is also required on-premises to interact with the RFID, in-store inventory, and security devices. Services that will require hardware are AWS IoT Greengrass and Amazon ECS Anywhere.


Read the Sustainability whitepaper

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.

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