Paulo Leonidas, GPA's director of supply, says that prior to adopting RFID, his company had to calculate the fish's average value since it was impossible to know each unit's exact weight at the time of distributing tons of goods to supermarkets. "So, the store received 30 kilograms of a product, on average"”but, in fact, it could be 32 kilos, which had just generated an additional sale of 2 kilos," Leonidas explains.

The executive says weight differences resulted in significant accounting discrepancies"”a problem that was eliminated with the use of RFID. The impact of this difference may seem to be merely 2 kilos at a single store, but across a network composed of hundreds of supermarkets, this variation amounts to a hundreds of kilograms valued at hundreds or thousands of Brazilian reals in revenue.

With the RFID system, the average weight was replaced by the actual weight. "RFID carries the RG of each of the boxes of products delivered to stores," Leonidas states. "If you have 32 kilos of fish, you have exactly 32 kilos, which eliminated the problem in the accounting books and also regarding the replacement of products."

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