Sector: Entertainment

Savings: $1 Million-plus

Submitted by ThingMagic

Disney is relying on RFID to make the Magic Kingdom even more enchanting – especially for its cast members. The theme park has deployed an RFID solution from ThingMagic to track $100 million worth of costumes worn by the likes of Cinderella, Mickey Mouse and others.

By streamlining the tracking process for these garments and making them easier to locate, Disney has saved more than $1 million. The primary benefit has been reducing inventory counting times from approximately 180 hours (for large costume storage areas) to two hours or less.

In addition, the system has improved the accuracy of inventory checks from 85 to 90 percent to nearly 100 percent. And since the need to staff checkout counters has been eliminated, personnel have been freed up for other tasks. The entire solution paid for itself in less than 12 months.

Under the system, a Disney cast member walks through rows of costumes at one of the 25 storage areas, selects the desired costume garments and proceeds to a kiosk powered by an integrated ThingMagic RFID reader. The cast member swipes an ID badge through a bar-code reader at the kiosk, where the member’s face and name are displayed on a video screen.

The RFID reader captures the garments’ tag IDs and feeds that information to the Disney garment management software, and cast members are off and running to greet fans without a moment’s delay.

When the cast member is done for the day, the costume is placed into a laundry chute where another ThingMagic RFID reader captures the tag IDs. The status of the garment is updated, including when it entered and exited the laundry area.

Disney also uses RFID-enabled inventory cycle count carts to expedite inventory counts in their costume storage areas. Before RFID, it took 15 to 20 employees nien to 12 hours to manually scan barcodes. Now, one or two workers complete the task in about 60 minutes.