RFID Enabled B2B E-Commerce Technologies and Applications

In recent years RFID emerged as powerful and disrupting technologies (Krotov and Junglas, 2008), which can have a major impact on enterprise business practices, changing the way business processes are designed (Lefebvre et al., 2005). It is perhaps the biggest thing to hit the IT world since the Internet (Heinrich, 2005). In fact, it has been coined as “the next big thing for management” (Wyld, 2006), the “key to automate everything” (Want, 2004) enabling “the next wave of the IT revolution” (Srivastava, 2004), and fostering a higher level of electronic integration between supply chain members (Bendavid et al., 2009). RFID represents far more than a technological hype and has deep implications for organizations B2B E-Commerce practices. It is still an emerging phenomenon with a relatively rapid speed of adoption and its diffusion global, spanning over industries in different continents. In 2008 the value of the entire RFID market was estimated to $5.29 billion, up from $4.93 billion in 2007 (IDTechEx, 2008). Although the current slow-down in the economic environment is impacting the worldwide RFID market for RFID hardware, software and services, according to VDC Research Group (2008), compared to earlier estimates, the market forecasts have to be lowered ABSTRACT