Building Resilient Supply Chains with IoT and Advanced Analytics: A Path to Operational Excellence

Recent global supply chain challenges have revealed that resilience has become crucial to the operational success of supply chains. Presenting the findings of this study, this research looks at how the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and analytical tools have gone a long way towards strengthening the supply chain. A large number of devices like sensors, RFID tags, and smart machinery connected to the supply chain help the organizations to track and monitor the process in order to make the right decisions, identify problems which may occur in the future and thus optimize the potential of supply chains. Combined with other related technologies including machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, the supply chain managers can process abundance of data to look for threats, compare the changing demand patterns and respond in advance. This paper presents several industrial applications of IoT and advanced analytics in supply chain and illustrates how the integration of the two technologies improve flexibility, avoid risk and increases the supply chain performance. The work also looks at the problems that accompany adoption of these technologies such as security, integration as well as the workforce skills required to support the implementations. In sum, this work articulates a conceptual model for managing IoT and Big Data in the pursuit of business productivity and economic viability in a complex and volatile global environment.