RFID-Integrated Retail Supply Chain Services: Lessons Learnt From The Smart Project

This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture that utilizes the automatic, unique identification capabilities of RFID technology, data stream management systems and web services, to support RFID-integrated supply chain services. In the lifespan of SMART project (IST-2005, FP6) two services have been deployed supporting dynamic-pricing of fresh products and management of promotion events. The two services have been field-tested in three retail stores in Greece, Ireland, and Cyprus. The valuable lessons learnt, concerning RFID readability challenges, consumer privacy, customers and store staff health concerns, investment cost, and so on, are reported to provide guidance to future developers of RFID-integrated supply chain services as well as to set an agenda for academic research

Gamification, Geolocation and Sensors for Employee Motivation Towards Energy Conservation at the Workplace

In an era of significant technological advancements, as well as dramatic changes in the business environment, the state of the workforce seems to remain problematic, with regards to motivation. Albeit prevailing societal clichés, that often seem to promote the idea that ‘the modern workplace provides for a far better experience than in the past’; the truth remains that modern employees bear a significant resemblance to their ancestors – regarding the emotional burden their jobs instil on them – and remain, in their majority, unmotivated. Gamification, a relatively new instrument in the “orchestra of motivation”, offers a promising alternative to the strict corporate rules and policies that usually dictate the employees’ conduct, by adhering to their intrinsic motivation. Simultaneously, two promising technological giants have risen, to invisibly, as well as ubiquitously accompany us in our every move. On one hand, the advancement of geolocation technologies has led to the introduction of location-based services and custom content delivery. On the other hand, sensors of all types and flavours, installed to measure countless parameters of our surroundings, the workplace included. Through our study, we aim to investigate the effect of the application of these three technologies – Gamification, Geolocation and Sensors – isolated, or in concert, on employee motivation towards a common goal – energy conservation at the workplace

RFID Enabled Visualisation of Product Flows: A Data Analytics Approach

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an information facilitator that can directly improve decision‐making; thus many retailers and suppliers have adopted it. A vast amount of RFID data streams has been gathered, however, it remains unutilized, or it is been exploited solely for inventory count purposes. This research proposes a way to analyze the immense volume of RFID data reflecting the behavior of products in retail stores, in order to produce information for inventory availability and inventory flows at different stages of the supply chain. We propose an RFID data analytics artifact that transforms RFID data captured in retail stores to the flows of the inventory/ products between locations in the stores. By mining the RFID data streams, we reveal the flow patterns of the products; these patterns correspond to the frequent product paths in the stores, and we provide them to the retailers in a visual manner. This unprecedented knowledge is valuable, because it can enable decisions ranging from shelves space allocation, dynamic pricing programs for slow-moving fresh products to product assortment. Furthermore, to testify artifacts’ correctness and usefulness, we have put it in practice, using real data provided by an Italian fashion retailer, in order to show how it can really support such decisions

Customer Visit Segmentation Using Market Basket Data

Basket analytics is a powerful tool in the retail context for acquiring knowledge about consumer shopping habits and preferences. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based artifact that mines customer visit segments from basket sales data. We characterize a customer visit by the purchased product categories in the basket and identify the shopping intention or mission behind the visit e.g. ‘breakfast’ visit to purchase cereal, milk, bread, cheese etc. We demonstrate the utility of the artifact by applying it to a real case of a major fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retailer. Apart from its theoretical contribution, the proposed approach extracts knowledge that may support several decisions ranging from marketing campaigns per customer segment, redesign of a store’s layout to product recommendations

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

EFFECTING EMPLOYEE ENERGY CONSERVATION BEHAVIOUR AT THE WORKPLACE BY UTILISING GAMIFICATION

Energy consumption is one of the widely recognised important factors that should be addressed, in reducing CO2 emissions towards addressing climate change. However, albeit the documented effect of public buildings, in specific, on energy consumption, only a limited body of research focuses on one of the most important factors that could limit it: employees’ energy consumption behaviour. Aiming to contribute to this path of research, we have identified gamification as an instrument that, when appropriately utilised, could lead to employees’ energy behaviour change. Additionally, we present a behavioural research model for employee energy conservation at work, in alignment with VBN theory of environmentalism, and a questionnaire instrument to validate it combined with practical experimentation. We consider two important categories of parameters that are connected to energy consumption behaviour in the workplace: Employees’ personal profile, which also influences the design and effectiveness of gamified apps, as well as level of environmental awareness. Concurrently, we also present preliminary findings from the analysis of the data collected after deploying the forementioned questionnaire instrument

Measuring the Business Value of Electronic Supply Chain Collaboration: The Case of Electronic Invoicing

In the last decade, supply chain management has changed its focus, centring now on value creation, by taking into consideration the recent trends of partners integration and implementation of internet technologies. Within this context, this paper presents measurable results regarding the business value of supply chain collaboration practices enabled by e-commerce technologies. The presented research addresses electronic supply chain collaboration by examining the case of electronic invoicing (the electronic exchange of invoice data between supply chain partners) as a type of collaborative message-based system. The paper presents the quantitative and qualitative results of a series of case studies from the grocery retail sector. The results indicate considerable cost savings, especially as the extent of collaboration increases. Additionally, qualitative results from the interviews are provided, supporting suggestions for future research

A MATTER OF TRUST AND EMOTIONS: A COMPLEXITY THEORY APPROACH TO EXPLAIN THE ADOPTION OF EGOVERNMENT SERVICES

This research uses complexity theory to offer a deeper insight on the causal patterns of factors explaining the adoption of e-government services. To this end, we propose a conceptual model comprising of affective factors (positive and negative emotions) and cognitive factors (trust of the government, trust of the service, and perceived net benefits of e-government services) along with research propositions. Our propositions are validated by employing a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of 502 users of e-government services. Findings indicate five configurations of cognitive and affective perceptions that lead to high intention to use an e-government service. Of paramount importance are affective values and trust values since their mandatory presence or absence is incorporated in all configurations. The study has both theoretical and practical implications for academic scholars pertaining the development of new e-government adoption theories and the provision of egovernment services