The perceived importance of major RFID-related technology initiatives among retail store managers

The emergence of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabling technology has many supply chain partners very concerned with its current and future uses, benefits to all in the value chain, the end consumers' satisfaction and the costs to implement, as well as personal privacy and legal issues. The audience that participated in the direct interview process were store managers of a major retail giant that has been a consistent leader in promoting the benefits of RFID-enabling technology with its supply chain partners and these managers were fairly representative of this firm, located in the Pittsburgh area. Based on factor analysis, Information Technology (IT)-related prerequisites, operational efficiency metrics and managerial and financial opportunities were statistically significant groupings (p < 0.05) that were derived from the independent variables that loaded into each grouping or factor-based construct, with a cumulative variance of 70.7%. Three hypotheses were tested with mixed results concerning the importance of RFID-based technology implementation, the degree of properly developed IT infrastructure before implementation, the expectations of timely and substantial Return On Investment (ROI) and if mandated, to implement RFID applications would have expected internal organisational improvement while seeing the value added of RFID-based implementation.