On 9 June, a conference on “Digitisation in fashion” was organised by the EU Watify campaign, in Bologna (Italy). The participants had also the occasion to attend to the first European match-making event between companies and research projects on innovative digital soultions for the fashion sector promoted by the European RegioTex initiative.

Lutz Walter (EURATEX) highlighted the great opportunities, but also the challenges posed by the rapid value chain transformation and traditional retail disruption brought by digitalisation. He strongly urged to embrace digital innovation highlighting that the fashion sector is crucial for jobs and economic growth in Europe, particularly in Italy. Current trends in the overall EU textile and clothing sector are positive with growth in 2016 in all key economic figures including employment.

Different projects have been presented to showcase several aspects of digitisation in fashion.

Interoperability between IT systems of fashion value chains helps companies to move to an industry 4.0 if each factory have all their systems interconnected and exchanging information. The supply chain is particularly sensitive for the fashion system at regional level. Piero De Sabbata (ENEA) presented eBIZ 4.0, the third step in the process of creating and disseminating an European standard for data exchange in fashion supply chains launched by EURATEX and technically supported by ENEA. The project includes three pilots, one in Italy, one in France and one in Spain to digitally connect at least 100 fashion companies across Europe to move forward with digital data exchange, traceability, fight against counterfeiting and more.

Companies and software houses are invited to fill an online survey to help on this thematic.

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