Walbusch, the family-run German apparel retailer founded in 1934 and headquartered in Solingen, is using item-level RFID inside the central distribution centre that supplies its stores and online shops. The detail appeared in an announcement from its warehouse software supplier on 12 November 2026, which put the site’s inventory accuracy at 99.99% and its on-time shipping at 97%.
The announcement came from Infios, the supply chain software company that traded as Koerber Supply Chain Software until it was rebranded in 2025. Its warehouse management product, Infios WM, has run at the Walbusch site since 2015. From 2021 the two companies expanded that work, bringing business-to-business and business-to-consumer fulfilment onto a single system logic while keeping the brands separated as distinct clients.
A 76,000 square metre site built for catalogue volumes
The facility sits at Ravenna Park in Halle, Westphalia, and is run by WB Logistik GmbH, the Walbusch group’s own logistics arm, which employs around 110 people. It covers the whole process chain, from goods receipt and order processing through to shipping, returns, quality assurance and product preparation. It was originally designed mainly for high-volume B2B work, and has been rebuilt to absorb a growing stream of individual e-commerce orders instead.
The wider group has more than 1,000 employees across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, runs over 50 stores alongside its own online shops, and carries the Walbusch, Mey & Edlich, Avena and Klepper brands. The expanded architecture is designed for up to 25,000 shipments a day and 6.5 million parcels a year, across as many as 250,000 storage locations. Infios WM also centrally controls the automation on site, which includes triple-deep shuttle systems, conveyor technology, the EcoPocket picking system, a matrix sorter and a horizontal tilting tray sorter. The site entered high-load operation in the middle of 2026.
“Infios WM provides the flexibility to adapt and further develop our operations without having to redesign the entire system landscape each time,” said Waldemar Erdmann, business unit lead at WB Logistik.
What the announcement actually says about RFID
One sentence, and this is it in full: “RFID-based identification and localization of individual items adds further transparency to warehouse operations, contributing to inventory accuracy of 99.99%.”
That wording is worth reading carefully, because it is doing less work than it first appears. Item-level RFID means every individual garment carries its own tag rather than a tag covering a carton or a pallet, which is what makes a stock count possible without handling each piece. But the 99.99% figure is attributed to the integrated Walbusch and Infios operation as a whole. RFID is described as contributing to it, alongside the shuttles, the sorters and the warehouse management system. Nothing in the announcement separates out what the tags deliver on their own.
What is not disclosed
Four things are missing, and each of them is the thing a reader building a business case would want:
Which items are tagged, and whether tagging happens at source or on receipt. Where in the 76,000 square metre site RFID is read, whether that is goods-in, picking, dispatch or returns. The frequency, tag type, reader type and vendor, none of which are named. And what RFID contributes to the accuracy figure by itself, as distinct from the automation and the software around it.
RFID News has asked WB Logistik and Infios for that detail and will update this article if either supplies it. Until then the honest summary is that a large German apparel operation is running item-level RFID at scale, and that the accuracy number it reports belongs to the whole system rather than to the tags.
More warehouse and distribution deployments are collected on the Logistics hub, and apparel and store-level work on the Retail hub.
