Developing a new frame for categorising use cases of RFID in the fashion and apparel sector

This paper proposes a new frame of reference for classifying the deployments of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technique in the field of fashion and apparel retailing. This frame comprehends all different use cases that can be found in the apparel retail sector, and it updates and expands what has already been done in scientific literature in this field. After a comprehensive analysis of the scientific literature, business journals, web portals, websites and blogs, the mentioned frame was built and it counts two levels. At a first level, 6 different categories of use cases were defined and described. At a greater detail, i.e. at level 2, each one of these categories was broken into 1 to 4 specific use cases, and these level 2 use cases describe very precise objectives pursued by an RFID implementation in the given business sector. Eventually, the proposed frame was validated by a panel of industry partners. The authors believe that the frame of reference proposed could be extremely useful for researchers and practitioners, because it presents a comprehensive, complete and up-to-date framework for categorizing deployments of RFID in the apparel and fashion retail, outlining opportunities and new research spaces abut RFID deployments in the industry.