Company staff intention to use RFID technology in fashion and apparel retail sector: A UTAUT based-model

The last two decades have seen a growing trend towards the application of item-level RFID technology in the fashion and apparel retail sector, with the main goals of automating supply chain processes and increasing their accuracy. Extensive research has shown that the chief advantages of deploying RFID technology in this sector are, amongst others, quick identification of customers’ needs and quick delivery of new products to the market; localization of products along the supply chain, as well as in retail stores; reduction of out-of-stock situations, and increased labour efficiency. Even though RFID is clearly in the ascent phase of technology lifecycle, it is not yet a standard in the sector of reference, and many companies, both at manufacturing and at distribution level, are still not certain of its payback period and return on investment. A key role for a successful RFID implementation is especially played by the inclination towards acceptance and use of technology by the company staff. In this paper, we present a questionnaire for assessing the acceptance and use of RFID technology at an important Italian company of the fashion and apparel sector. After a broad review of existing literature, we decided to use the well-known Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to evaluate the opinions and intentions of employees that use RFID technology to pursue different use cases. Our assumption is, in fact, that operative staff can provide information about the intentions and the ease-of-use of a new technology, as well as the "perceived usefulness". The responses to our questionnaire show a strong intention to use and perceived usefulness of the technology, and these results were used to further direct the implementation in other stores, and thus they can be of interest both for practitioners and researchers.