Avery Dennison announced the expansion of its nine-year RFID supply partnership with Marks & Spencer (M&S), a U.K.-based apparel and food retailer.

M&S will extend its use of Avery Dennison’s RFID technology to all clothing and home wares in order to provide a better customer experience by ensuring that the correct product mix is available in-store and online.

Prior to implementing RFID, M&S relied on optical scanners to track inventory, using bar codes to scan a maximum of 400 – 600 items per hour. RFID enables merchandise to be accurately scanned at up to 15,000 items per hour. This also enables M&S to replenish stock from the distribution center more quickly and accurately, making more garment sizes available to more customers.

Avery Dennison has supplied almost one billion RFID tags to M&S with no data loss or duplication. The tags can be read when an RFID scanner is up to a meter away, making the inventory tracking process faster and more efficient.

This expanded roll out will take place throughout all departments in the course of 2013 and will be complete by Spring 2014. In the future M&S plans to expand the use of RFID scanning throughout the supply chain to increase accuracy and speed of distribution.