JCPenney CEO Ron Johnson is going all in with his bid to remake the customer experience at the century-old department store retailer. A mobile POS deployment beginning this fall is just the first step in an ambitious plan involving storewide use of RFID to eliminate traditional cash wrap stations, allowing anywhere, anytime checkout, including self-checkout, by 2014.

AL-KO, a German producer of industrial air conditioners for airport hangars and other spaces, is employing a radio frequency identification solution to plan its production more precisely, by tracking the movements of parts between two production sites located 550 kilometers (342 miles) apart.

Idealcombi has reduced the time required to produce a custom window or door down to about one minute, using EPC Gen 2 passive UHF tags to automatically adjust the settings on its manufacturing equipment.

Retail theft, including shoplifting, employee theft, administrative error and vendor fraud is down, according to an annual survey recently conducted by the University of Florida. The National Retail Security Survey 2011 report found that theft as a percentage of revenue was 1.41 percent, down from 1.49 percent in the previous findings. This calculates to an approximate $2.6bn decline in losses.

When prices are updated at the E.Leclerc supermarket in Saint-Jean-du-Falga, France, as many as 30,000 labels can change automatically, bringing an end to a time-consuming process by which staff previously had to manually print and swap out printed labels on store shelves.

Wavelink Corp. has released Velocity, a mobile browser which provides fast delivery of Web-based applications to rugged mobile devices.

Automobile manufacturer Volkswagen Slovakia is tracking its assembled vehicles as they undergo final servicing and inspection processes at its plant in Bratislava, using a real-time location system (RTLS).

Mojix Inc. has made generally available a new version of its STAR 300 System, offering real-time tracking capabilities for supply chains.

Real-time locations systems (RTLS) are increasingly being deployed in companies with revenues of $200m or more across all regions and vertical markets, according to 2012 research by VDC Research Group.

Electronics manufacturer Jabil has been applying radio frequency identification tags to some of the printed circuit boards assemblies (PCBAs) that it manufactures for Cisco Systems. As a result, according to B.J. Favaro, Cisco Systems' supply chain manager, and Bill Hajje, Jabil's global process manager, the firm has improved the efficiency of its production process by approximately 80 percent, benefiting both companies.