Extenuating operational risks through digital transformation of agri-food supply chains

Abstract

The increasingly unprecedented incidents (e.g. COVID-19) have made the contemporary supply chains more vulnerable to divergent risks and disruptions. Encouragingly, the recent trend of digital transformation, adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies (I4Ts), could significantly improve business processes extenuating potential risks and disruptions. Yet, there is a paucity of quantitative studies on the risk or disruption mitigation and I4Ts, specifically on agri-food industry. Using a sample of 302 firms from the Australian agri-food supply chains, we explore if the firms that adopt I4Ts experience the different impact of operational risks (supply-demand mismatch, financial and transportation) compared to others. The findings unveil that albeit such risks can significantly undermine firm performance, their negative effect is non-significant for the firms that adopt I4Ts compared to those that do not adopt. We thus suggest digital transformation as an effective way to extenuate operational risks and disruptions amid unanticipated events like COVID-19. Numerous contributions to theory and practice, plus United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (1 & 2) have been discussed.

Keywords:

• Industry 4.0 technologies
• supply chain risk
• COVID-19
• food industry
• empirical

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Imran Ali

Dr. Imran Ali is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Operations and Innovation Management at School of Business and Law in the Central Queensland University, Melbourne Campus, Australia. Dr Imran also serves as a ‘Food Systems Expert’ at the FAO of the United Nations to develop resilient food systems in the developing and developed countries of the world. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Management from the University of South Australia. His current research focuses on Industry 4.0, internet of things, blockchain, risk and resilience, climate change, sustainable supply chain performance. Imran’s research has been featured in several good-quality journals and conference proceedings such as IEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Production Planning & Control, Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, and Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, among others. In collaboration with UNDP and FAO of the UN, Imran has availed the opportunity to work on several promising projects around operations and supply chain management.

Kannan Govindan

Kannan Govindan is a Distinguished Professor at China Institute of FTZ Supply Chain, Head of Intelligent Supply Chain Centre and Professor & Head of Centre for Sustainable Supply Chain Engineering at the Department of Technology and Innovation, University of Southern Denmark, Odense. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher within ‘Engineering’ for three years in a row (2018, 2019, and 2020) by Thomson-Reuters/Clarivate Analytics. He has published more than 285 international journal articles (with 33635+ citations and H-index of 100) in leading journals such as Nature, European Journal of Operational Research, Omega, Decision Sciences, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Cleaner Production, Computers & Industrial Engineering, Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, European Management Journal, International Journal of Production Economics and International Journal of Production Research. Many of his papers were selected as the ESI top 1% highly cited papers or 0.1% hot papers and highlighted as the Key Scientific Articles contributing to the excellence in Engineering and Environmental research. Kannan serves as executive editor of the Journal of Cleaner Production, associate editor of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, senior editor of Industrial Management & Data Systems, editor of Annals of Operations Research, an area Editor of INFORM: Information Systems and Operational Research, and has served as a guest editor in journals such as Decision Sciences, European Journal of Operations Research, Annals of OR, Journal of Cleaner Production, International Journal of Production Economics. His research interests include digital supply chain, industry 4.0 on supply chain, sustainable development goals, reverse logistics, closed loop supply chain, digitalized sustainable circular economy, green supply chain management, and sustainable supply chain management.