The whole consortium is interested in enhancing the performance of the T/C sector for recovering the employment decrease, following the de-localisation of the production and maintaining or augmenting the global European turnover with reference to the main competitors.

Since the production de-localisation is unavoidable, in the framework of the globalisation process, the entrepreneurs realise that the competition is played on the following points:

• holding of the control of the supply chain
• reduction of time to market
• strengthening of the share of the richest markets, like USA, Japan, Germany
• increase of the quality level of products and related services.

Globally the companies expect to reduce the costs for order management and the stock-out due to fabric unavailability.

The path to pursue a broad take-up of the results is the following:

• firstly, the interoperability is experimented among the industrial partners of the consortium: for example in the relationship between the fabric suppliers: Reda, Loro Piana and Vitale Barberis Canonico, and the garment manufacturer Corneliani;
• secondly, each industrial partner implement the interoperability with its most relevant and steady interlocutors, suppliers and clients;
• thirdly, the basis of the interlocutors is enlarged involving the business community also through targeted dissemination activity.

Obligations and rights of participants and relationships between participants.

The partners agree that the final versions of the basic middleware tools and of the DTD or XML Schemas (of the documents to be exchanged) will be available for free use to the companies, technology suppliers and associations operating in the Textile/Clothing sector, with the only restrictions needed to avoid improper uses.