Digitalization in Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Purpose: Digitalization is one of the major buzzword in today’s global supply chain management. There is a fundamental shift in supply chain management- from a traditional supply chain to a digital supply chain (DSC), every organization is moving towards a digital transformation approach for supply chain management. The use of Industrial Revolution 4.0 has prompted the digitization of supply chain management in general due to recent technological advancements. In the new business environment, only organisations that can prepare for and welcome change will survive. The need to survive in this competitive era is to continuous upgrade the services software in accordance with market demands. In general, this does not indicate that technology must be changed quickly. However, the idea is to be prepared for evolution when something new means something better. The evolution and implementation of supply chains in the digital environment of operational functions and what are the challenges being faced are briefly presented in this study.

Design/Methodology/Approach: To identify the challenges in implementation of digitalization in company’s supply chain descriptive research design is used. Both primary and secondary data has been used. Primary data is collected using questionnaire get filled from 62 respondents working in supply chain industry. Analysis is done by Microsoft excel.

Findings: The digital Supply Chain vision of the companies is at the developing phase. Factors like agility, Performance and visibility in real time and also the ability to connect to the internet from anywhere in the world affect the implementation of digitalization in supply chain management in an organization. The study find several benefits of digital supply chain management in an organization like Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), expert systems, machine learning, robots, block chain, and big data analytics help organisations achieve strategic goals. But still there are several technological, organisational and strategic challenges remain to overcome to foster the success of the digital supply chain management.

Originality Value: The paper used both primary and secondary data. The secondary data is collected from the article, journals, reports and websites. And primary data was collected by using the structured questionnaire. The finding suggested that for a company to become competitive digitalization of the supply chain is necessity.

Paper Type: Empirical Research Paper