Abstract
There is growing interest and investment in the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology as a means of greater visibility in supply chains, leading to improved inventory management through improved customer and sales information in retail chains. Retailing is emerging as a technology-intensive industry, and China and India are emerging as potential major retail countries. Given the growing importance of the retail business and application of information and communications technologies (ICTs), particularly RFID, it is important to understand RFID technology per se and its likely benefits in the retail sector in a developing country like India, where even bar codes are still not ubiquitous. We discuss RFID technology and its potential scope in the retail sector briefly, and the Indian retail sector in considerable detail. Thereafter, we discuss the findings of field case studies of three upcoming retail chains, all of which are working on identifying the possibility of switching to RFID from bar codes in the coming future. We attempt to understand how RFID application is likely to impact their operations and supply chains. We develop an adoption and implementation barrier framework and find out where the three retail chains stand in this framework. Finally, we suggest managerial recommendations, as well as directions for future work.
Published Version
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