The never-ending work on eBIZ specifications in the last months is facing new challenges and new opportunities: with the aim to give continuity and stimulate contributions for the publication of the next release, the European project eBIZ-4.0 (COSME programme) was launched in December 2016 and has completed its first year of activities. Thanks to the work in progress on the three project pilots, a new draft proposal for next release of eBIZ specification is already available, with a number of improvements and updates.

A detailed market analysis on barriers and needs in RFID and eBIZ adoption in European Textile-Clothing and Footwear (TCF) industry, supported also by an on-line survey, has revealed until now two main obstacles to the massive spread of the two technologies among industry: the limited use of RFID outside the boundaries of companies’ informative systems and the lack of knowledge about the benefits of eBIZ adoption. A lot of effort is being spent for overcoming those barriers, investigating at the same time the emerging needs of Fashion companies (omnichannels, track and trace, etc.) and analyzing new business models that could bring at a massive spread of eBIZ across European industries.

The on-line survey has already involved more than 80 companies and is still open. Go to the link for more explanations and to get the version in your national language.

The pilots are impacting two different sub sectors of the fashion industry: Textile & Clothing and Footwear; Spain, France and Italy are the three different geographical areas interested by the eBIZ-4.0 pilots, characterized by a common large development of fashion industry but also by different production features. Clavei (Spain), Schaeffer Productique (France) and Kyklos (Italy) are the three IT solution providers leading the related national pilots, with the common objective of involving about 100 European fashion companies, digitally connected thanks to eBIZ and adopting RFID solutions, improving their processes management along their supply chains.

In Italy the focus is on clothing production, with the management of subcontractors dealing with issues of preferential origin certification and multi-tier relationships and the complex concepts typical of the international brands like ‘events’ or different operational handling according to the different targets of the production. In France the application domain is Textile Clothing Upstream, and the work with the pilot is oriented in improving the already existing eBIZ user community around the portal Ecoltex and focusing on exchanged data quality. In Spain we have two supply chains working on implementing eBIZ and RFID for the management of about 125 stores in footwear sector.

The preliminary results of the project will be presented at IT4Fashion 2018, April 18-20th, Florence, Italy.