RFID technology in Retail 4.0: state-of-the-art in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods field

What is it about?

The well-known Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is now evolving its applications: indeed, at the industrial level, it was firstly conceived at the pallet/case level for enhancing productivity and accuracy of logistics processes, while at present the focus is shifting towards item-level tagging applications for also managing in-store processes, including the selling experience. Due to a more technological customer, to the spread of e-commerce and the need of omnichannel sales availability, also Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) are subject to an evolution of the way of selling, enabled by an item-level RFID tagging. Since these technologies are connected to the fourth industrial revolution, this novelty is referred to as Retail 4.0, which is still an uncommon term among the scientific community. For this reason, this paper makes an attempt to define the state-of-the-art of research and industrial projects on this topic, and it represents the first study investigating the Retail 4.0 from a practical side, closing the scientific gap regarding this issue. Eleven documents and fourteen projects focusing on item-level RFID tagging of FMCGs are examined and categorized according to a pre-existing use cases framework, and the enabled scenarios under a Retail 4.0 perspective are identified and defined. Inventory and Life-Cycle Management related use cases turned out to be the most investigated (7 scientific documents and 12 projects), while the User Experience was only considered at the industrial level (12 projects). From both sides, the Product Integrity was not perceived as relevant (2 articles and 6 projects); similarly, scarce attention was paid to the sustainability functionality of packaging with a total of 1 scientific paper and 5 projects.

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