An exploration study to detect important factors influencing on development of RFID in after sales services

Article history: Received January 20, 2014 Accepted 30 August 2014 Available online August 3


Introduction
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the wireless use of electromagnetic fields to transfer necessary information, for the purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to various objects.Konsynski and Smith (2003) summarized the ways in which firms and academics were thinking about RFID technologies and stimulated strategic thinking about their possible implications.There are literally various studies on the effects of RFID implementation for business development.Fosso Wamba et al. (2008) presented application of RFID for business to business development in retail industry.They concluded that RFID implementation could improve supply chain management.Attaran (2007) introduced RFID as an enabler of supply chain management.Janz et al. (2005) discussed different successful implementation of RFID for health care industry.Li et al. (2005) discussed different applications of mobile RFID for health care purposes.

The proposed study
This paper presents a survey to study the role of different factors influencing on RFID implementation in after sales services.The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 20 managers who work for after sales services in auto industry located in city of Tehran, Iran.Shannon (2001) proposed the entropy concept, which is a measure of uncertainty in information formulated in terms of probability theory.The entropy concept is well suited for measuring the relative contrast intensities of criteria to demonstrate the average intrinsic information transmitted to the decision maker (Zeleny, 1982).

Entropy weighting method
The entropy weighting method (Zeleny, 1982) can effectively measure the average essence of data quantity, and the larger the entropy value, the lower the information express quantity (Zeleny, 1982, Feng & Chen, 1992).The steps of the algorithm can be summarized as follows: Step 1.Let x ij , i = 1, 2, . . ., m; j = 1, 2,. . ., n, be the superiority rating of the i th alternative under j th criterion above the alternative level.Then we can define and we call X as decision matrix.
Step 2. Form normal decision matrix Step 3. Calculation of concentration index for per criteria's data as follows, In Eq. ( 3), lower value for E j implies less concentration of data C j criteria and more dispersal of its data.

The results
The proposed study of this paper uses the existing literatire as well as brain storming with some experts has derived some important factors summarized in Table 1 as follows, As we can observe from the results of Table 1, there are 29 items associated with the proposed study of this paper.We have further discussed the items and managed to reduce the number of items, accordingly.In addition, Table 2 shows details of our rankings for sub-factors.

Discussion and conclusion
The implementation of Entropy weighting method for four major attributes of management, economic, technical and environmental yields 0.2487, 0.2511, 0.2486 and 0.2516, respectively.As we can observe from the results of Table 2, Coordination of RFID with organizational strategy as an environmental factor is number one priority followed by the availability of necessary budget as well as management team's willingness on execution of such project.Organizational culture is the third important factor, which plays essential role for the development of RFID in after sales services.In addition, technological maturity and financial affordability are other important factors, which could help for the RFID development.In terms of environmental factors, having a good risk assessment and compatibility with existing standards are another important factors for the proposed study of this paper while building a good relationship with customers is another important management factor.The results of our survey are somewhat consistent with the results of Ozturk and Palakurthi (2010), Brown and Russell (2007) and Shih et al. (2008).

Table 1
The summary of factors on the effect of RFID for business development in auto industry

Table 2
The summary of ranking for sub-factors