Christmas is a busy time for a lot of companies. For Grupo Disber, the season is especially demanding. In Spain, the (cesta de navidad) Christmas basket, filled with various foods and alcoholic beverages, is the most popular holiday gift, the company reports. Over the course of a few months, Grupo Disber sells 1.5 million of the baskets to consumers and businesses, making it the nation's leading provider of such items. To keep a better eye on the Christmas baskets as they are packed onto pallets and shipped-in order to both reduce labor and increase accuracy-the company has installed an RFID system that tracks the baskets as they travel through the firm's 807,000-square-foot complex of warehouses, located in Valencia. The technology, the company reports, has reduced its staffing costs by 10 percent, as well as eliminated 90 percent of shipping mistakes and resulting customer returns.
