Role of Internet of Things in Enhancing Supply Chain Collaboration

In today's competitive market, supply chain operations ought to be jointly planned and executed by the various partners. Substantial benefits are then attained by the collaborators including creating efficiencies, meeting the customers' needs, optimizing responses to disruptions, among others. Technological developments are increasingly being recognized as a major enabler of effective collaboration in supply chain. In particular, Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in enhancing the collaboration capabilities in supply chain. An analysis for understanding the role of IoT in facilitating supply chain collaboration is carried out. To that end, a mapping study, based on secondary sources of data, is conducted wherein the solicited impacts and use cases are mapped to the different collaborative advantages highlighted by the existing research. Namely, these are process efficiency, added flexibility, business synergy, and quality and innovation. The IoT features that can be leveraged to the benefit of each of the advantages along with illustrative examples and use cases are provided. Finally, some of the challenges thwarting such implementations are discussed.