Supply chain digitalization: past, present and future

Abstract

The fourth Industrial Revolution is driving the creation of a more connected ecosystem. Organizations are now re-shaping their strategies to become increasingly transparent, including their supply chain management (SCM). The area of supply chain digitalization is starting to attract growing attention; however, its research status remains unclear. We set out, in this study, to understand what constitutes the underlying structure of its research, what topics have been investigated, what areas need further attention, how the existing literature can be classified and how the discipline can move forward. We applied a mixed-method approach using both quantitative and qualitative techniques to achieve this. A bibliometric analysis of 331 articles with 12,709 references was first conducted followed by a qualitative content analysis. Results point at a tentative future research agenda featuring five paths: data science-enabled SCM, supply chain agility, humanizing manufacturing through digital manufacturing strategy, Omni-channel and Internet of Things, and resource-based view and beyond.

Keywords:

• Supply chain digitalization
• meta-analysis
• bibliometric
• content analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zahra Seyedghorban

Zahra Seyedghorban is an Assistant Professor in Operations and Supply Chain Management in the Department of Management and Marketing, and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Workplace Leadership at the University of Melbourne. Her research includes digital supply chain management, sustainability, procurement, and buyer-supplier relationships. Her research work has appeared in the Journal of Business Research and Journal of Advertising.

Hossein Tahernejad

Hossein Tahernejad is a project manager at T2 Tea (Unilever) with extensive experience in digitalisation of processes, helping organizations to become digitalized in their practices specially operations and supply chain management.

Royston Meriton

Royston Meriton is an Assistant Professor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Loughborough University London, and an associate academic fellow at Leeds University Business School. Two strands of interrelated knowledge domains characterize his research work. He has a keen interest in digitally-enabled capabilities at both the organizational and supply chain levels. In particular, his work focuses on the emerging operations and business model innovations in the smart cities landscape with an accentuated emphasis on issues relating to sustainability and production democratization. He is currently the lead methods expert tasked with designing a data collection protocol for an impact case study for the ongoing Southern Africa Innovation Support (SAIS) programme financed by the Finnish Government. He is also working with a range of hotels in the Seychelles to advance knowledge and understanding on the role of social media in hotel operations in SIDS. He has an emerging portfolio of academic articles in internationally ranked journals.

Gary Graham

Gary Graham is an Associate Professor in Operations and Supply Chain Management at Leeds University, and a visiting research scholar at MIT’s Centre for Transport and Logistics and Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing. His work focuses on digitalization, smart cities, future production technology and their interplay with supply chain management. With specific reference to sourcing strategies in the electric sports car and pharmaceuticals sectors. Graham is also working on an extensive investigation on diversity in the Thinkers 50 ranking of world leading business and management ideas. Finally, he’s completing bibliometric work on ‘digitalization’ and supply chain ‘readiness’.