Big Data Analytics on The Supply Chain Management: A Significant Impact

The present competitive marketplace, significant development of information technology, increase of customer expectations, and economic globalization, has caused a huge impact on the way companies and the different business sectors manage data produced from their daily operations. Supply chain professionals are being faced with an explosive increase in the amount of data being generated and this is causing them to struggle to handle such an enormous amount of data to accomplish a more productive, flexible, and cost-efficient way of manufacturing and delivering products. The current situation that supply chain professionals are in has created the need to acquire, develop and adapt to new mechanisms that can efficiently help with the evaluation and interpretation of excessive volume of data. The implementation of Big Data Analytics (BDA) is now serving as a powerful strategy that companies and supply chain professionals can use to solve this issue. There is a variety of means provided by big data analytics that can be used to obtain useful information from a large volume of data. The present work seeks to explore how big data analytics is performing in the context of Supply Chain Management (SCM). This research begins with the fundamentals of supply chain management and big data analytics, followed by the implementation of BDA in the different areas of SCM, and then benefits of big data on supply chain management are presented. Finally, issues and challenges of adopting and practicing BDA and future trends are also discussed.