RFID-enabled Supply Chain Collaboration Services in a Networked Retail Business Environment

Since the early 1990s, there has been a growing understanding that supply chain management should be built around information sharing and collaboration among supply chain partners. The emergence of RFID technology is expected to revolutionize many of the collaborative supply chain processes and to empower new collaboration scenarios, such as anti-counterfeiting, product recall and reverse logistics, collaborative in-store promotion management and total inventory management. This paper proposes eight RFID-enabled supply chain collaboration services (e.g. dynamic pricing, smart recall, in-store promotion management, out-of-shelf response) in a networked retail business environment. The services are characterized, on a high-level, by the information shared between retailers and suppliers, the level of tagging (pallet/case/item level) and the location of the tag readers. Also, a scalable-distributed network architecture, building on the possibilities provided by web service orchestration and data stream management systems, is proposed to support these collaborative supply chain management processes. However, this paper introduces into a research-in-progress with the ultimate purpose to assess and categorize the RFID-enabled supply chain collaboration services according to four dimensions: the extent of collaboration required between retailers and suppliers, the RFID technology requirements, the transformation of existing (or the introduction of new) processes and the business performance impact of the RFID-enabled collaborative service. This research is partly funded by the European Commission (IST-2005, FP6) through the IST SMART research project with participating user companies being European grocery retailers and suppliers from the fast-moving consumer goods sector.