eBusiness is based on digital data and documents exchanged between IT systems of firms.
Adoption of a standard language and of shared procedures offers to firms immediate advantages, like costs and errors reduction as well as time and labour savings.
In respect of proprietary formats, a standard language facilitates the creation of new eBusiness relationships and cuts maintenance costs, in parallel it assures good scalability for future uses.

The current eBIZ Reference Architecture has a chapter dedicated to RFID technology adoption.
Who uses RFID technology for logistic optimisation gets great advantages by connecting RFID and eBIZ technology.
RFID enables logistics optimization (picking, goods delivery, ecc.), the parallel adoption of eBIZ allows to share advantages with the commercial partners, from inventory reporting to despacth advice anticipating the physical flow o freights.
Sinergy between flows of digital information supported by eBIZ and traceability actions for anti-counterfeiting initiatives and for contrasting parallel sales channels are highly interesting.

'If I have sell-out data…'
'If I have a faithful inventory report, I could activate a never-out-of-stock service …'
'If the warehouse systems had the list of freights going to be delivered …'
'Se non dovessi continuamente richiamare al telefono per avere le date delle consegne …'
'Suppliers fill data on IT systems when they have the time, often in a uncomplete way …'
'Each order is uploaded manually and sometimes we get an error…'
'The solution could be nice but our supplier does not want to invest so much for me only …'
'each customer ask for the same information but with a different format and different procedures …'

In order to setup eBIZ you should, firstly, identify the collaboration processes that have to be implemented prioritarily. Later, through the Reference Architecture of eBIZ, the job of the IT manager to adapt the company information system to eBIZ is facilitated.

ENEA CROSS-TEC laboratory aims to support firms in new technologies adoption.
In the framework of its institutional activities, the laboratory can help you and your IT providers to understand opportunities and advantages of adopting eBIZ in your business.
For more information or to receive further material you can contact the laboratory responsible: piero.desabbata@enea.it

Launched by European Commission, eBIZ-TCF project (2008-2010) was co-ordinated by EURATEX (European Confederation of textile and apparel industry) with the support of CEC (European Confederation of footwear industry) and ENEA, and developed a Reference Architecture for data exchanges that is publicly available and based on the harmonisation of experiences and results from Moda-ML, Shoenet and GS1.

Launched at CEN (European Committee for Standardisation) in 2012, CEN Workshop eBIZ is an European standardisation initiative, promoted by EURATEX with the support of ENEA, with the aim of improve eBIZ results and foster a more extended adoption in the fashion industry. The Workshop lasted for 18 months and was the opportunity for stakeholder to work jointly and propose new developments (for example to better support RFID usage).

eBIZ 4.0 is an European COSME project, launched on December 2016 and addressing the joint adoption of eBIZ and RFID in the European supply chains. The project is based on three industrial pilots in Spain, Italy and France.

Since June 2013 the Reference Architecture, version 2.0, is available as CEN WS Agreement (CEN CWA 16667), up-to-date and supporting new market requirements, as identified by an international experts group working in the framework of CEN.
Among the other novelties, beyond RFID, there contributions from GS1 about business collaboration models between producers and retail organisations.
Compared with previous 2010 version (click here ), the new eBIZ Reference Architecture 2.0 for eBusiness harmonisation in Textile/Clothing and Footwear sectors" has new contents related to:

• A method to represent and classify Business Models,
• Production Scenarios for customised footwear products for fashion and for health,
• Cross-organisation RFID adoption support,
• Electronic eInvoice,
• Test and compliance checking,
• Yarn techical properties modelling and management in supply relationships,
• Web Services based Communication Protocols.