دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی بررسی مزایای بالقوه و چالش های مرتبط با یکپارچگی اینترنت اشیا در زنجیره تامین - امرالد 2017

Abstract

Purpose – The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to have a huge impact on businesses and, especially, the way we think about supply chain management (SCM). However, there is still a paucity of studies on the impact of IoT adoption on supply chains and on different aspects of the business in general. The purpose of this paper is to examine the perception of the academic community of the impact of the IoT adoption in organizational supply chains with a view to verify potential key benefits and challenges existent in the literature. The research presents the impact on an organization along with the impact across its entire supply chain. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected through the use of an online survey and 87 participants completed the survey. Participants were mainly from the academic community and were university scholars based in different countries located in six continents. Participants were authors, or co-authors, of academic papers published in the Decision Science Institute 2015 and 2016 annual conference proceedings, the 21st International Symposium of Sustainable Transport and Supply Chain Innovations, the Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 2016 issues, and the Operations and Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 2016 issues. Findings – The authors were able to confirm the significance of some of the examined potential benefits to individual organizations and their entire supply chains. However, the study identified other potential benefits that were not seen as a direct impact of IoT adoption. Most of the examined potential benefits were found to contribute to a number of critical success factors for implementing successful SCM. The authors were also able to confirm that some of the examined potential challenges were still perceived as key hinders to IoT adoption but examined potential challenges were not seen as hurdles to IoT adoption. Originality/value – To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind. Although some literature attempted to provide an overview about the IoT management, no study has specifically explored potential benefits and challenges related to the adoption of IoT in supply chains and ranked them based on their significance. The results can be beneficial to academic scholars interested in the researched topic, business professionals, organizations within different sectors, and any other party interested in understanding more about the impact of adopting IoT on SCM.

5. Conclusions

5.1 Conclusions and recommendations

This study used a reliable and valid research instrument that included 65 scale items. These items were divided into four constructs, namely, IoT adoption benefits to individual organizations (17 items), IoT adoption benefits to entire supply chain (18 items), IoT adoption challenges/risks to an individual organization (15 items), and IoT adoption challenges/risks to entire supply chain (15 items). In conclusion, the study demonstrated the following: the mean values for the examined 35 potential benefits, for an organization and its supply chain, were 3.63 and above on a five-point scale and had mode values of 4 and 5. These were equivalent to “Agree” and “Strongly Agree” on the used five-point agreement Likert scale. This indicated that IoT can provide valuable benefits and may result in achieving competitive advantages for individual organizations and their entire supply chains. On the other hand, the participants rated high the examined 30 potential challenges an individual organization and its supply chain are likely to face when adoption IoT. The mean values of the examined 30 items had 3.54 and above and mode values of 4 and 5. These were equivalent to “Agree” and “Strongly Agree” on the used five-point agreement Likert scale. This indicates that there are still a number of recognized challenges and risks that organizations need to overcome before adopting IoT and harvest potential benefits. Table XI shows how the examined benefits in this study contribute to the 13 critical success factors for implementing SCM identified by (Kumar et al., 2015). As shown in Table X, IoT adoption contributes to the different critical success factors as following: higher flexibly in production system ( five contributors); effective information sharing with supply chain members ( four contributors); focus on core strengths ( four contributors); development of effective SCM strategies (three contributors); use of modern technologies (three contributors); devoted resources for supply chain (three contributors); forecasting of demand on point-of-sale (two contributors); development of reliable suppliers (two contributors); focus on core strengths (two contributors); and logistics synchronization (one contributor).