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Big data analytics for optimizing supply chain management: a state of the art
literature review

Rajib Hossain Khan (rk222id@student.lnu.se)

Mana Abedi Sohrforouzani (ma223ye@student.lnu.se)
Shahrzad Darvishi (sd222im@student.lnu.se)
Marie Claire Ukwishaka (mu222ch@student.lnu.se)

Introduction
Widespread use of digital technologies has boost the emergence of big data analytics (BDA) as a critical
business capability to equip companies with better means to obtain value from an increasingly massive
amount of data and gain a powerful competitive advantage (Chen, Chiang and Storey, 2012). Firms that
utilize big data effectively and efficiently can convert it into useful insights and thus intelligence is
delivered while needed throughout various levels of the organization (Chen, Preston and Swink, 2015).
BDA has received growing attention in supply chain management (SCM) because of the complexity of
handling big data and the significant role of SCM in improving overall business performance. SCM is
facing the most substantial challenges that may result in inefficiencies and wastage in supply chains, such
as delayed shipments, rising fuel costs, inconsistent suppliers, and ever-increasing customer expectations
(Barnaghi, Sheth and Hensen, 2013).

Companies are greatly capitalizing on BDA in logistics and supply chain operations to improve the
visibility, flexibility, and integration of global supply chains and logistics processes, effectively manage
demand volatility and handle cost fluctuations (Genpact, 2014). BDA plays a pivotal role in the strategic
phase of supply chain planning. It has been used to help companies make strategic decisions on sourcing,
supply chain network design, product design and development. In the operational planning phase, BDA
has been applied to assist management in making supply chain operation decisions that often include
demand planning, procurement, production, inventory and logistics. BDA is still in its infancy and
required to explore in SCM (Wang et al., 2016). The main purpose of this study is to understand how
BDA can be applied in order to optimize different aspects of SCM.

To accomplish the afore-stated purpose, a literature searching was carried out from 19th February till 2nd
March 2018. Primarily ‘Google Scholar’ has been used for literature searching. The literature searching
was started with keywords like ‘application of big data in industries’, ‘big data AND industry’ and ‘big
data analytics AND industry’ etc. The hits showed that there are plenty of publications about the
application of big data in industries like transportation, automotive industry, food industry, supply chain
and logistics etc. Based on the primary review of accessed literatures, it was decided to select ‘application
of BDA in supply chain’ for the final review.

In the second phase, more extensive literature searching was carried out by using keywords like ‘role of
big data in supply chain’, ‘application of big data for optimizing supply chain’, ‘big data analytics in
supply chain’, ‘big data AND supply chain’ etc. When authorization was needed to download the original
scientific paper from the publishers’ website, the ‘Linnaeus University Library Database’ is used.
Publishers’ website such as ScienceDirect, IEEE, Emerald, Springer, Taylor and Francis are more
frequently accessed to download the articles. The selected articles (28) were published in reputed journals
and conference proceedings, so there is no confusion about the quality of the reviewed papers. In addition
to the selected articles, other scholarly publications were used to ensure proper understanding.

Literature review
The selected scientific papers were divided into two groups: conceptual and problem-solving papers. The
conceptual papers were thoroughly read and analyzed to understand the concept of BDA, SCM and the
overlapping ideas between these two areas of interests. The reflection of that work is reported under
illustrative headings.

Concept of BDA
The concept of big data has been first used in 1997 by two NASA researchers to refer to the visualization
challenge for computer systems with respectively large data sets (Cox and Ellsworth, 1997). BDA is a
holistic approach for managing, processing and analyzing the “5 V’s” of data related attributes (volume,
velocity, variety, veracity and value) to create actionable insights for ensuring sustainable value delivery,
performance measurement and establishment of competitive advantages (Wamba et al., 2015).
International Data Center (IDC) argued that, “Big data technology describes a new era of technology and
is designed to extract the value from large-scale and diversified data by high-speed capture, discovery and
analysis techniques” (Gantz and Reinsel, 2011). Although this is a widely accepted and cited definition
of big data, it embodies the “4 V’s” (volume, velocity, variety and value) (Manyika et al., 2011; Gogia et
al., 2012). In order to emphasize the importance of data quality and level of trust in large data sources,
‘veracity’ was considered and appended with the other features of big data (White, 2012). Wamba and
Akter (2015) mentioned that BDA has emerged as ‘the next big thing’ in management. Scholars and
practitioners even think that it is the ‘fourth paradigm of science’ (Strawn, 2012), or even ‘the next
frontier for innovation, competition and productivity’ (Manyika et al., 2011) or the ‘new paradigm of
knowledge assets’ (Hagstrom, 2012). These notions are mainly driven by the pervasive adoption and use
of different tools and technologies, including social media (Facebook, Twitter), mobile devices
(smartphones, tabs), Internet of Things (IoT) enabled automatic identification technologies (radio
frequency identification (RFID), sensors) and cloud enabled platforms to support intra- and inter-
organizational business processes and achieve competitive advantages (Wamba and Akter, 2015).

5 V’s of big data

Because of the fast-paced and far-reaching development of information and communication technologies
(ICTs), big data has become a critical asset for most of the organizations (Nguyen et al., 2017). There has
been a lot of discussion about the characteristics of big data but most of the scholars talked about volume,
velocity, variety, veracity and value and refereed them as ‘5 V’s of big data’ (Wamba et al., 2015;
Assunção et al., 2015; Emani, Cullot and Nicolle, 2015). Volume refers to the magnitude of data that is
increasing exponentially and thus posing a challenge to the capacity of existing storage devices (Chen and
Zhang, 2014). Velocity is the speed of data generation and delivery that can be processed in batch, real-
time, nearly real-time or streamlines (Assunção et al., 2015). Variety means that data can be generated
from heterogeneous sources, such as, sensors, IoT, mobile devices, social networks, etc. and in different
formats like structured, semi-structured and unstructured (Tan et al., 2015). Veracity imposes more focus
on the issue of data quality and level of trust because of the concern that many data sources like social
media may be contaminated with data that are characterized by certain degree of uncertainty and
unreliability (Gandomi and Haider, 2015; White, 2012). Last but not the least is value, which denotes the
process of exposing unexploited values from big data to support decision making (Gantz and Reinsel,
2012; Dijcks, 2012).
BDA and competitive advantage
Although businesses are investing a lot of money for the development of information systems (IS), they
are still struggling to gain competitive advantages. This is because these systems tend to produce large
amount of data that are beyond to be analyzed (Barbosa et al., 2017). In order to pursue competitive
advantages, organizations need to initiate the analysis and application of data that are captured from those
IS (Ranjan, 2009; Sangari and Razmi, 2015). Logistics networks generate around 1.6 billion new data
items every month (Ilie-Zudor et al., 2015). Analysis of such large quantity of data is generally called
BDA (Barbosa et al., 2017). Analytics is a combination of multiple IT-enabled resources for gaining
information, answering questions, predicting outcomes of actions, supporting decision making and finally
creating competitive advantages (Barbosa, Ladeira and de la Calle Vicente, 2017; Davenport and Harris,
2007; Davenport, Harris and Morison, 2010; Trkman et al., 2010). BDA provides a critical source of
meaningful information that may help stakeholders to get improved insights, which they can use for
gaining competitive advantages (Hagstrom, 2012). Akter et al. (2016) suggested that BDA can play an
important role to enhance firms’ performance. By the improvement of BDA capability, a firm can create
new products and services, provide better customer service, increase sales and revenue and expand into
the market (Tiwari, Wee and Daryanto, 2018). BDA has a positive impact in various domains: it helps
renovating supply chains, increasing sales and managing customer loyalty in marketing, optimizing real-
time route and reducing costs in transportation, minimizing risks in finance and enhancing the efficiency
of some treatments in medical sciences (Benabdellah et al., 2016).

Concept of SCM
Supply chain can be defined as “a bidirectional flow of information, products and money between the
initial suppliers and final customers through different organizations” (Nurmilaakso, 2008). Benabdellah et
al. (2016) stated that supply chain members are interconnected by a significant physical flow that includes
raw materials, work-in process inventories, finished products and returned items, information flows and
financial flows. SCM is the process of planning, implementing and controlling these flows. Raisinghani
and Meade (2005) think that supply chain consists of all stages involved in fulfilling a customer request.
It does not only include the manufacturer and suppliers, but also transporters, warehouses, retailers and
customers. Some of the core functions in supply chain are new product development, marketing,
operations, distribution, finance and customer service (Barbosa et al., 2017). Global Supply Chain Forum
identified eight key processes that made up the core of SCM: Customer Relationship Management
(CRM), Customer Service Management (CSM), Demand Management (DeM), Order Fulfillment (OrF),
Manufacturing Flow Management (MFM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Product
Development and Commercialization (PDC) and Returns Management (ReM) (Croxton et al., 2001). Due
to the ever-increasing competition and globalized business environment, manufacturers have been
discovering innovative technologies and strategies to accomplish and sustain competitive advantages. The
strategy that has gained wide acceptance and consensus among academicians and practitioners is SCM
(Han and Chu, 2009; Irfan, Xiaofei and Chun, 2008; Han et al., 2002).

SCM and competitive advantage

The competition between ‘firms versus firms’ have been shifted towards ‘supply chain versus supply
chain’. In this condition, the capacity to optimize the supply chain is becoming a critical success factor for
companies to get competitive advantages over their rivals (Benabdellah et al., 2016). Thus the focus on
SCM has compelled many companies to reconsider their competitive strategies (Zacharia, Sanders and
Nix, 2011). Many of these companies are trying to win with data (Hopkins, LaValle and Balboni, 2010).
In fact, the use of big data can offer significant value to companies in areas such as product development,
market demand predictions, supplying decisions, distribution optimization and customer feedback. The
increased data flow by supply chains from service and manufacturing sectors leveraging a growing
interest for the notion of big data. Particularly, companies related with transport and logistics are mostly
exploiting big data (Benabdellah et al., 2016). For example, the leading logistics companies like DHL
(Germany) and Maersk (Denmark) have taken some steps in the field of big data to enhance their
competitiveness (Martin, Moritz and Frank, 2013; Fawcett and Waller, 2013). Big data has brought a new
source of competitive advantages for logistics operators to carry out SCM for obtaining enhanced
visibility, ability to adjust under demand and fluctuations of capacity in a real-time basis, insights about
customer behavior and patterns to achieve smarter pricing and better products (Swaminathan, 2012).

Complexity in supply chain

Complexity in supply chains is associated with materials and information flows between supply chain
partners. In traditional supply chain these flows are directed sequentially from supplier to customer but
nowadays these flows looks like a simultaneous exchange, especially through electronic exchanges
among all supply chain partners (Bouhaddou and Benabdelhafid, 2015). In order to understand the
complexity of supply chain, the following factors should be considered (Benabdellah et al., 2016). These
are: number of components (products, processes, supply chain partners, relationships, interactions, goals
and location), diversity (homogeneity and heterogeneity of systems), interdependency (interdependence
among items, products and supply chain partners), variety (dynamical behavior of a system) and
uncertainty (difficulties to represent a clear picture of a system because of the lack of information and
knowledge). In most of the occasions, there are internal networks in the firm with simultaneous exchange
of data among different units. In fact, the mass application of ICT facilitating exchange among all the
partners made a change in the organization of the supply chain flows (Lockamy and McCormack, 2004;
Huang, Sheoran and Keskar, 2005). Managing these sorts of complexity in supply chain is compulsory
for the companies to compete well in the global market (Benabdellah et al., 2016).

5 V’s of SCM
Conventionally SCM was focused on the collection and storage of enormous amount of data (Irfan,
Xiaofei and Chun, 2008; Dekker et al., 2013). However, currently they are facing great challenges while
contemplating to make full use of those data (Zhong et al., 2016; Bouhaddou and Benabdelhafid, 2015).
An enormous amount of data is generated tremendously within SCM from all over the world in every
second. For instance, a personal care manufacturer generates 5000 data samples every 33 milliseconds,
resulting in 152,000 samples per second, 9 million per minute, 13 billion per day, and 4 trillion samples
per year (Markopoulos, 2012). These figures indicate that the volumes of data matters in SCM. The
velocity of processing such huge amount of data is significant as data-driven decisions should be made as
timely as possible (Zhong et al., 2016). The vast data generated from SCM are usually variable due to the
diverse sources, heterogeneous formats and various sensors used in manufacturing sites, highways and
retailer shops (Benabdellah et al., 2016; Zhong et al., 2016). Data generated from SCM should be verified
(veracity) to get rid of bad data such as noises, inaccurate attributes etc. The value of reports, statistics
and decisions obtained from big data is difficult to gauge due to the large influences on micro and macro
level perspectives (Zhong et al., 2016).

Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model and BDA

SCOR is a model that covers the core supply chain processes (plan, source, make, deliver and return),
which is generally recognized as a systematic approach for identifying, evaluating and monitoring supply
chain performance (Trkman et al., 2010). Benabdellah et al. (2016) discussed about the application of
BDA across the five supply chain processes that are introduced by the SCOR model. During the process
of planning big data can decrease the risk of infrastructure investments and contracted external capacities.
Big data may revolutionize how supplier networks form, grow, proliferate into new markets and mature
over time. Application of analytics techniques enables the optimization of manufacturing processes, shop-
floor management and manufacturing logistics (Dekker et al., 2013; Tan et al., 2015) which allows
producing new products in a more efficient manner (Chae, 2015) and cutting logistics costs (Zhong,
2015). BDA can be utilized by the companies to forecast the changes of demand in order to match their
supply. BDA enables to know customers perceptions of offered products and services to discover their
unobservable characteristics for understanding market demands and anticipating future consumer product
variety desires. The customer’s knowledge facilitates the development of new products and services in a
customized way and thus consequently improves their satisfaction (Tan et al., 2015; Ng et al., 2015).

Supply chain analytics

Analytics is not a new thing in SCM (Souza, 2014). Business analytics using IS support has a strong
association to supply chain performance (Trkman et al., 2010). Supply chain analytics can be used to refer
to the advanced BDA in SCM (Wang et al., 2016). This analytics can be classified as descriptive,
predictive and prescriptive (Souza, 2014; Wang et al., 2016). Tiwari, Wee and Daryanto (2018) have
explained these three types of supply chain analytics. Descriptive analytics are especially useful for the
illustration of total stock in inventory, average money spent per customer and year to year deviations in
sales. Examples of descriptive analytics are reports that provide historical insights regarding firms’
production, financial operations, sales, inventory and customers. Predictive analytics can be used
throughout the organization, from forecasting customer behavior and purchasing patterns to identifying
trends in sales activities. It is also helpful to forecast demand for inputs from the supply chains, operations
and inventory records. Prescriptive analytics can be successfully used to optimize production, scheduling
and inventory in the supply chain. Statistical analysis, simulation and optimization are the most popular
techniques in supply chain analytics (Wang et al., 2016). These techniques works as the basis for supply
chain decision making along with other techniques such as meta-heuristic method (Fan, Heilig and Voß,
2015).

Findings
The papers lies in the problem-solving group were analyzed and reported in this section. In this case, it
was tried to understand the problem and the concept/theory/framework/model used or developed as part
of the solution of the identified problem. The findings are reported under representative headings in a
summarized way.

Big data in supply chain risk management (SCRM)

Supply chain risks are usually generated from its internal and external uncertainties. The internal
uncertainties are anticipated mostly based on the internal data that are collected by advanced technologies
within the production and transportation systems. On the other hand, external uncertainties originate from
external environments, such as, social, economic and natural environments. External uncertainties are
more complicated and multifaceted than the internal ones. So, advanced analytic methods and decision
support systems are required for external uncertainty analysis. Therefore, Fan, Heilig and Voß (2015)
developed a framework to improve SCRM by collecting, analyzing and monitoring real-time supply chain
data. Possible supply chain risks, such as product quality issues and transportation delays can be
forecasted in advance and traced afterwards based on the analysis of supply chain internal data. The
authors intended to find out potential risks and ongoing disasters from supply chain external big data as
early as possible.

The SCM system that is going to be developed under this framework includes three main modules as
supply chain planning module, supply chain internal module and supply chain external module. The most
crucial parts of this framework are planning and monitoring. The planning part will be handled by supply
chain planning module while the monitoring part will be administered by the supply chain internal and
external module. When an emerging risk will be detected by the internal or external module, a risk report
will be generated based on risk analysis and will be sent to the planning module. The planning module
will then generate a new supply chain plan on the basis of risk report. The whole process will run in a
circle to maintain flexibility of the supply chain under stochastic situations. It was suggested to outsource
supply chain external big data processing tasks to professional third-party analysis (3PA) companies.

Big data enabled quality management in supply chain

Tan et al. (2016) discussed how advanced big data tools can be applied to ‘quality analytics’ for
monitoring and improving quality in an electronic industry. The data analytics approach discussed by the
authors ranges from business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modeling and
visualization through dashboards that include three different types of analytics as descriptive, predictive
and prescriptive. In supply chain, there exists different types of data, such as, structured, semi-structured
and unstructured; different format of data specification; different pass fail criteria of processed data
ranging from sub-tier, supplier, manufacturing, field telemetry (customer) as well as social media data
like Facebook, twitter, technical web forums and a lot more. Data management activities include data
understanding and data preparation. Two types of data, such as: manufacturing data (generated and stored
in manufacturing centers) and warranty return data (generated and stored in service and repair centers) are
traditionally collected to understand the product quality performance. These types of data are usually very
structured. Data collection methodologies like KNIME (3rd party open source tool) or IBM SPSS Modeler
(full featured proprietary tool) can be used to perform Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) work. Once
data collection is done, three major tasks, such as: data selection, data integration and quality audit, and
data formatting are conducted in the data preparation phase.

Descriptive analytics uses historical data to answer questions on what happened and why it happened. In
manufacturing supply chain, this help the product owners to monitor the quality trend of the manufactured
products and look for the reason differentiating good and bad parts. It can also be used to identify areas to
improve, or marked as a best practice references if an area is performing well. Appropriate data
visualization techniques should be used so that the data presented can be easily understood and the users
can take actions or make decisions quickly after the observation. Among different types data visualization
techniques, the most common form of charts used are the basic line, bar, area and pie charts. Different
data visualization tools like IBM Cognos Analytics, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite, SAP
Business Objects and IBM’s Watson Analytics can be used to visualize the results of analysis so that it
helps the audience to understand the insights easily in comparison to traditional lengthy reports. After
descriptive analytics, the next step is predictive modeling. Predictive analytics uses a variety of statistical
and modeling techniques to study historical data and figure out possible patterns, therefore allowing
analysts to make inference and predictions about the future with an acceptable level of reliability. It helps
organizations to optimize limited resources and to make decisions and take proactive actions.

The objective of product modeling is to estimate product reliability using data sources containing both
parametric and non-parametric information. After the predictive model is being built, the next step is to
compare it against traditional descriptive analysis result. In one of IBM’s internal implementation of a
quality predictive project, analytic tools like IBM SPSS Modeler, R Studio, KNIME and RapidMiner
were used and it was possible to achieve a significant breakthrough in workflow productivity. Prescriptive
analytics translates predictive analytics into a feasible proactive plan for business and helps users identify
the best insight-based actions. A further extension of predictive and prescriptive analytics is cognitive
analytics. It is an advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that utilizes deep machine learning
techniques, augmented with Natural Language Processing (NLP) that has the ability to be constantly
trained so that it becomes better and better over time. With the help of data visualization, instead of
referring users to multiple reports on pivot table or excel charts, it is possible to view all in one
dashboard. It reduces the time spent on reading through lengthy reports and thus employees have more
time to response and solve the issue that has occurred. An advanced modern enterprise should have data
governance standards, which mandates that only ‘harvesable’ data can be stored and used within the
organization. With the correct business plan and strategy, quality analytics in supply chain can enable a
predictive and proactive approach from product womb to tomb quality early detection and to leverage
data to drive insightful decision making so as to reduce commodity field defects and eventually save costs
for the company.

Big data fueled process management of supply risks

He et al. (2014) proposed an agile process management framework to monitor and manage supply risks.
To accomplish this purpose, the authors established a business process and then installed a big data
analytics component. Supply risk is one of the major risks among the other risks (production risk,
distribution risk and demand risk) faced by SCM. The proposed framework is a novel three-phase
supplier risk management process that transforms the traditional supply management process into a
responsive and dynamic one. The first part senses, predicts and alerts risks by fusing environmental and
traditional data while the second part models the major material flow of a supply chain by evaluating the
impact of supply fluctuations and disruptions with the help of a simulation engine. The last part outlines
work flows to opt an effective mitigation plan via what-if analysis by calling the simulation engine. The
architecture that supports the proposed supplier risk management process consists of data sources
(traditional and new data sources), analytics and optimization functions (statistical control chart, time
series, text analytics, classification method, discrete event simulation engine and dynamic programming
solver) and key process components (risk prediction, risk simulation and evaluation and risk mitigation).

In fact, the analysis and optimization functions support key process components. The key process
components would be invoked according to the business process definition and could be triggered either
periodically or by events. The risk management process is divided into the following four sections as
sensing, prediction, evaluation and mitigation while business units such as data team, analytics team,
supply chain team and emergence team are respectively responsible for these sections. The proposed
solution assembles a couple of analytics and optimization technologies to deliver an end-to-end result in
supply risk management. It helps the supply chain become agiler in risk identification and more
responsive in risk mitigation. Based on this framework, a platform would be developed that could plug in
most of data sources with minimal configuration which could be consumable via API and viewable from
browsers (Internet Explorer/Firefox/Chrome).

Dynamic integration of analytics processing in supply chain business processes

Fukui (2016) described a systems approach that can be considered for the dynamic integration of
analytics processing into the supply chain business processes. This approach enables the combination of
new technology to existing supply chain management systems without having major systems reform.
There are basically two major groups of systems in ICT industry (Moore, 2011). They are ‘Systems of
Record (SoR - related to business processing and recording)’ and ‘Systems of Engagement (SoE - related
to people and things)’. SoR and SoE vary in terms of system requirements, operational requirements and
development style. The effort to create value by integrating SoR and SoE is increasing in the field of
SCM. However, while performing integration some points are worthy enough to be considered. The
method for system integration should be determined on the basis of data synchronization and data
volume. While exchanging, sharing and analyzing data across multiple systems, differences in the code
architecture of systems can become a vital issue. A pre-code conversion rule in Master Data Management
(MDM) can become handy in such cases.

In an e-commerce site, an order takes place after hundreds and thousands of searches for products and
then addition of the desired products in the cart. To handle this issue, use of microservice architecture
techniques for API extraction and loosely coupled design is particularly important. When it comes to
system integration model, there are two possible options, one is centralized and the other is distributed.
These models are context dependent. So, it is necessary to adjust the synchronism of the integration
process (real-time or batch), and to design distinctive use and combination of centralized model and
distributed model according to the needs to be realized. Fujitsu has developed a cloud-based platform,
called MetaArc, to maximize the use of digital technologies for business growth and to achieve a digital
transformation together with the customers. K5 is the core cloud service platform for MetaArc that
enables customers to use previously prepared integrating functions and common services, making it easy
to perform SoR and SoE system integration.

Big data and security of the ICT supply chain

Lu et al. (2013) discussed three aspects of ICT supply chain security: information management, ICT
system integrity and cyberspace. The supply chain is actually an extremely complex information
management system. Products and services provided by ICT supply chain usually transfer and carry large
amounts of data. Companies often need to share inventory information, sales information, forecasts,
customer data and technical documentation and so on. To share this information, which is critical to
individual enterprise and the entire supply chain, networking equipment is needed. If any of the nodes of
this networking equipment is attacked, all enterprises in the supply chain will be affected. So, managing
the information is a serious issue in the ICT supply chain. In the context of information security, integrity
means that the data has not been altered in an unauthorized manner, degraded or compromised. The ICT
supply chain is experienced with many security issues, many of which may cause big data security
problems: the malicious logic on hardware and software, installation of counterfeit modules, problems in
production process or important product and service distribution process, inadvertently installed hardware
and software vulnerabilities. The asymmetry of cyberspace threats in ICT supply chain made big data
encounter unprecedented crisis (Hageman et al., 2010). Till now there is no particular model that covers
the entire ICT supply chain operations but several famous supply chain models have been promulgated
from different angels.

SCOR model is conducive to promoting the internal and external supply chain cooperation and the level
process integration, by means of giving relationships between processes. It enables accurate
communication between enterprises, objective performance assessment and the determination of
performance improvement. Cyber Supply Chain Assurance Reference Model (CSCARM) emphasizes
that there is a need to implement security measures in cyber supply chain life cycle and to make an
effective integration between the field of network security and supply chain risk management. The most
important goal of this model is: define a series of related principles/measures and its organizational
framework. If these principles/measures are effectively implemented, the construction and operation of
the cooperating agencies, the integrity and quality of ICT supply chain system, and the highly integrated
control implementation will become reality. Supply Chain Security Dimension (SCSD) model serves as a
pragmatic starting point for thinking creatively about the process of optimizing the security profile. It can
also be used as a framework to discuss with supply chain partners about the coordinated effort to improve
the security of shipments throughout the entire supply chain. NIST-System Development Life Cycle
model put emphasis on the security measures in all phases of system development life cycle. The ICT
Supply Chain Risk Management Community Framework (SCRMCF) is an amalgamation of the SCOR
model, CSCARM and NIST-System Development Life Cycle model. This framework includes two
functions which are defense in depth and breadth. These two functions provide a comprehensive ICT
SCRM controls. Based on these five models Lu et al. (2013) proposed a series of recommendations to
improve security of the communication equipment supply chain from data sharing, integrity, cyber,
personnel and risk management perspectives.

Multi-agent based system (MAS) for SCM incorporated with BDA

Giannakis and Louis (2016) developed a multi-agent-based SCM that incorporates big data analytics
which can make autonomous corrective control actions. They adopted a sequential approach for the
development of the architecture of the system. Three fundamental dimensions of supply chain agility –
responsiveness, flexibility and speed are identified at first. The organizational design of the system is
conducted then. The roles that will be played by each of the agents within the framework were determined
based on the logic of fundamental supply chain processes and the interactions among those agents were
modeled on the basis of some scenarios. As technical development of the system is beyond the objectives
of this study, emphasis has been given to the analysis stage. The proposed SCM MAS consists of three
modules that reflect fundamental supply chain processes: a module of agents responsible for production
fulfillment processes (order management, manufacturer, procurement, logistics, subcontractor and the
suppliers’ agents), a module of agents responsible for supply chain event management and a module of
agents responsible for disruption risk management processes.

The functionality of the system is as follows: the production fulfillment module coordinates the supply,
production and delivery processes of the supply chain. The monitoring module overlooks the smooth
functioning of the production fulfillment process and synthesizes the supply chain events with the
disruption management processes. The disruption risk management module is triggered by a potential
disruption that occurs during the order fulfillment process. As the selected supply chain model is
considered as customer driven, the order acquisition is taken as the start of the information flow for an
order in the framework. In the analysis portion the authors focused on the production fulfillment
processes of the entire system and conceptualized and analyzed the agent-based processes involved for
the coordination of the order, supply, production and delivery processes. The novelty of this framework is
the incorporation of a big data agent that includes semantic attributes for semantic web technologies to
enable the agents to collect and interpret semantic information for the supply chain partners. The
proposed system can lead to enhanced supply chain agility, despite the increased complexity of global
supply chain. Some case scenarios are discussed to show how each of the second tier dimensions of
supply chain agility can be improved with the use of the proposed MAS.

BDA for sustainable retail environment

Verma and Sing (2017) designed a system to assist retail business owners to better understand the
purchase needs of their customers and hence to attract customers to physical retail stores away from
competitors e-commerce websites. Such a system can assist the retail business owners to improve sales
volume, reduce out of stock problem, increase profits, reduce spoilage and improve customer purchase
confidence from their stores. The findings of this study reveal that conventional mining algorithms have
not evolved to support big data analysis as required by modern retail businesses. They require a lot of
resources such as memory and computational power. The proposed system design is done in three steps:
data collection from various conventional and non-conventional sources, analysis of social media for
trend prediction and market basket analysis using MR-Apriori association mining. Market basket analysis
for association mining comes from supermarket to address the retailer requirement to give offer on
various products which are likely to be sold together and hence to increase sales and profits. Three
important constraints are used for significant association rules extraction, such as, support, confidence and
lift. This work introduced MapReduce based Apriori algorithm (MR-Apriori) that can overcome various
limitations associated with classical Apriori algorithm.

There are three phases in the proposed system architecture: preprocessing module, engine manager
module and association module. Unprocessed data from retail transactional databases are fed into
preprocessing module to divide data into data sets on the basis of transaction IDs and is further fed to
engine manager module via input queue. The number of processing engines initiated by engine manager
module is dependent on current load requirement. The frequent item set generated by engine manager
module is fed to association module via output queue to further generate association rules using AMR
based association mining algorithm. In order to assist retailer to find frequent item sets from customers’
transaction database and to determine effectiveness of proposed approach, MR-Apriori algorithm is
implemented in the form of intelligent retail mining (IRM) tool. Due to simple and retailer friendly
interface, IRM tool is well capable to satisfy the customer’s preference information needs of retailer
irrespective of his/her technical or non-technical background. Real time processing capability of the
proposed approach is evaluated based on the following criteria’s: scalability, extensibility and
promptness. Finally, the proposed system is an innovative association between Hadoop based intelligent
cloud architecture and MapReduce based Apriori association mining in the form of IRM tool for market
basket analysis to assist retail business owners for extracting useful, previously unknown buying
preferences of customers to launch new schemes and offers.

Big data in humanitarian supply chain

Prasad, Zakaria and Altay (2016) developed a resource dependence model connecting BDA to
humanitarian supply chain networks. BDA in humanitarian operations has been developed for rapid
response. For humanitarian organizations operating in complex and dynamic environments, visibility of
mission critical assets and their allocation and coordination across affected populations represents a big
challenge. Organizations engage in collaborations with external stakeholders in order to manage their
dependency on critical resources. Resource dependence theory is a theory of power and influence that
originates due to resource dependence and external constraints. BDA is a critical strategic driver in
creating humanitarian services. The attributes of data (volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value) are
applicable to humanitarian services in the developing world context and outcomes can be classified in
terms of deliverables, lead-times, costs and resilience. A model is developed that specifies how data
attributes vary by the type of value stream, the role of dependency on data attributes and the ways in
which data attributes affect outcomes. Multiple forms of humanitarian supply chain value streams
(education, healthcare, disaster relief) are found to be associated with different mix of data attributes.
Supply chain actors affect the relative power on the focal NGO; which is derived based upon the
resources being provided by the various supply chain actors. The power can be utilized in order to
demand big data from the focal NGO.

It was also found that certain types of data attributes are associated with different types of outcomes. For
instance, volume tends to positively affect the quality of deliverables, reduce costs and shorten lead-times,
while velocity and veracity influences efficiency in terms of lead-times and increased resilience. Veracity
is also found to be positively related to deliverables, reduced costs, shorter lead-times and increased
resilience. The proposed model provides a basis for focal NGOs, donors and development agencies in
designing humanitarian interventions and specifying big data expectations. Specifically, prior to a
proposed intervention, the focal NGO and important stakeholders need to identify the respective critical
data attributes (volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value) that need to be generated for that type of
intervention. Furthermore, there needs to be an understanding of the type of expected outcomes
(deliverables, costs, lead-times, resilience) which would be forthcoming based on the attributes. Finally,
the critical resource providers need to apply pressure to ensure that the focal NGO indeed creates the
specified data attributes to produce superior humanitarian outcomes. The value attribute seems to have an
effect primarily on the deliverables but potentially plays an important role in improving the humanitarian
supply chain through data extraction and transformation. The potential of data extraction and
transformation actually lies in inter-value stream analysis.

Restructuring supply chain based on big data and mobile internet

Ma, Nie and Lu (2015) demonstrated that big data and mobile internet have a revolutionary impact on the
supply chain reconstruction by remodeling crucial links in supply chain, like marketing, payment,
distribution and warehousing. Warehouse-type supermarket business has an important feature which is
the direct purchase on a large scale according to their capacity. With the rapid development of big data
and mobile internet, e-commerce overwhelmingly dominates the development of traditional retail.
Although supermarkets generally have powerful computer management system, covering procurement,
logistics, service, sales, general administration and other areas, it is not sufficient to challenge e-
commerce. In order to get competitive advantages traditional retail should also introduce the big data and
mobile internet technology into management. Warehouse-type supermarket can learn O2O mode to
develop its own app with the mobile internet to achieve the integration of online and offline. Therefore,
consumers can choose their desired goods in the mobile terminal. Big data enabled information
processing capabilities will dig the data and form the individual consumer behavior, consumption habits
and other data. According to these personalized information, supermarkets deliver targeted advertising to
achieve precision marketing to consumers. Online payment can reduce business costs, saves consumers
time, improves operational efficiency and enhance the customer experience.

Monitoring of logistics enterprises and consumers can be divided into two levels. From the consumers’
level, logistics and distribution systems should establish a personal database for each consumer which is
associated with their delivery address and phone number so that consumers can visit the distribution
system, view real-time logistics information and broadcast distribution system through blogs and apps.
From the level of logistics, warehouse-type supermarkets should develop mobile logistics information
platform. With BDA and mobile internet the supermarkets can develop the chattel mortgage and pledge of
warehouse receipts in logistics finance business. After the reconstruction of warehouse-type supermarket
supply chain; selection of merchandise, ordering, payment, delivery and other links will become available
through the mobile terminal. Intelligent logistics platform which is the core of warehouse-type
supermarket, can achieve information, digitization, networking, integration and visualization by big data
and mobile internet, which makes warehouse-type supermarket realize intelligent and green logistics. Big
data and mobile internet save consumers time and provide services to them with a great convenience,
which is the most critical success factor for supermarkets.

Social media data analytics to improve SCM

Singh, Shukla and Mishra (2017) proposed a BDA approach that considers social media data for the
identification of SCM issues in food industries. In terms of social media data analytics three major issues
are considered: data harvesting/capturing, data storage and data analysis. In case of Twitter, data
capturing starts with finding the topic of interest by using an appropriate keywords list (including text and
hash tags). This keyword list is used along with the Twitter streaming APIs to gather publicly available
datasets from Twitter postings. Twitter streaming APIs allow data analysts to collect 1% of the available
Twitter datasets. As the information available on social media is predominantly in the unstructured textual
format, content analysis approach is employed to analyze those data. Tweets contain sentiments as well as
information about the topic. Thus, sophisticated text mining procedures, such as sentiment analysis, is
vital for extracting true customer opinion. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a technique for supervised
machine learning that is useful for sentiment analysis. Once the semantic score is identified through the
SVM and subjectivity identification is done, then hierarchical clustering method is applied individually to
the tweets, which are positively and negatively scored.

The proposed approach was used to understand issues related to the beef/steak supply chain based on
customer feedback on Twitter. It is helpful to analyze the reason behind positive and negative sentiments,
to identify communication patterns, prevalent topics and contents, and characteristics of Twitter users
discussing about beef and steak. After the analysis, it was revealed that there were numerous issues
affecting customer satisfaction, such as bad flavor, hard texture, extra fat, discoloration of beef products,
and presence of horsemeat in beef products. The root causes of these issues are located within various
segments of the supply chain and are often interrelated. Usually, retailers struggle to establish the relation
between customer dissatisfaction and their root causes. The findings would assist beef retailers in
developing a consumer centric supply chain. Using social media data, a company may gain insight into
the perception of their existing or potential consumers about their product offerings.
Discussion
SCM is traditionally regarded as a research domain of operations management (Chen, Preston and Swink,
2015). But recently it has received appreciable attention from IS scholars because SCM can also be
conceptualized as a collection of digitally enabled inter-firm processes (Rai, Patnayakuni and Seth,
2006).The optimization of supply chain visibility (SCV) is one of the major concerns for SCM nowadays.
SCV is a complex problem because of the interaction between involved people, processes, technologies
and information flows (Leveling, Edelbrock and Otto, 2014). The main purpose of SCV is to visualize
current activities and involvements along a supply chain, which can be used to collect information for
decision makers in cases like when interruption occurs (Goh et al., 2013). IT-based SCM systems enable
a focal firm to integrate the flow of information, materials and finances with its supply chain partners and
thus contributing to organizational outcomes (Dehning, Richardson and Zmud, 2007). Therefore, SCM
domain provides a useful context to examine BDA use (Chen, Preston and Swink, 2015).

Brinch, Stentoft and Jensen (2017) have chosen SCOR as an analytical framework for identifying
applications of big data in SCM processes. Previous studies have applied SCOR to evaluate applications
of supply chain analytics for strategic, tactical and operational purposes, and argued that big data indeed
have potential to make better decisions (Chae and Olson, 2013). SCOR has also been used to determine
the application of business analytics and the required analytical supply chain process capabilities like
capabilities to plan and predict market trends of products and services (Souza, 2014). Service, logistics
and planning processes are more suitable for adapting big data applications than manufacturing, sourcing
and return processes (Brinch, Stentoft and Jensen, 2017). Big data is focused to a larger extent on service
than on typical manufacturing supply chain with physical products. Earlier studies have discovered
service applications for big data, such as, maintenance, customer service and product support (Li et al.,
2015).

The analysis of unstructured data is the biggest challenge in humanitarian SCM. When a disaster occurs,
an immense amount of unstructured data is generated within a shorter period of time. One of the common
sources of unstructured data is the social media. Much of humanitarian data falls into four broad
categories: (1) situational awareness - (provides information about the latest conditions, needs and
location of the targeted communities); (2) operational/programmatic data - (necessary in order to plan and
implement humanitarian assistance programs); (3) background information – (about history, geography,
population, socio-economic structure, infrastructure and culture of the country); and (4) analysis – (allows
to interpret the collected information in context) (King, 2005). If sentiment analysis can be carried out on
this unstructured data then it can assist in the execution of humanitarian relief operations (Gupta, Altay
and Lou, 2017). One of the key factors of successful humanitarian operations is situational awareness,
which entails observing the elements of the context, combining and interpreting it, and projecting on it to
make predictions about impending events (Mehrotra et al., 2013).

The study of Twitter (social media and big data in general) is rare in the area of SCM (Chae, 2015). While
discussing about the role of social media in SCM O’Leary (2011) raised five possible areas. Firstly, social
media information can be integrated into supply chain transaction processing system. Secondly, social
media can be used as a way of building relationships among the partners in supply chain. Thirdly,
information and knowledge gathered from the use of social media by supply chain participants can
provide insight into issues such as evolving supply chain ontologies or gathering and shaping information
and knowledge about participants’ reputation. Fourthly, social media, such as prediction markets can help
generate information and insights from participants that are not normally accessible. Finally, social media
appears to impact on velocity with which information is generated and processed. It was also suggested
that Twitter can be used for detecting supply chain events and facilitating frequent communication among
supply chain partners. Twitter data (Tweets and metadata) can be collected by identifying the topics of
interest using keyword(s) or hashtag(s) and requires the use of API. Then the collected data can be
analyzed by an analytical framework like descriptive analytics, content analytics or network analytics to
extract insights (Chae, 2015).

There are two types of supply chain risks based on their sources: risks arising from the internal supply
chain networks and those from the external environments (Goh, Lim and Meng, 2007). Tang (2006)
classified supply chain risks into operation and disruption risks. Operations risks may be associated with
uncertainties inherent in a supply chain that include demand, supply and cost uncertainties, while
disruption risks are those caused by major natural and man-made disasters like flood, earthquake, tsunami
and major economic crisis. Both operations and disruption risks could seriously disrupt and delay
materials, information and cash flow, which in the end could damage sales, increase costs or both (Chopra
and Sodhi, 2004). Therefore the aim of supply chain risk management is to reduce the probability of risk
events occurring and to increase resilience that is the capability to recover from a disruption (Nyoman
Pujawan and Geraldin, 2009). It has been noted that BDA not only facilitates enhanced decision making,
increased visibility and greater value but also better risk management (Chae, Olson and Sheu, 2014;
Lycett, 2013).

Kuei and Madu (2001) explained that quality in SCM means meeting market demands correctly and
achieving customer satisfaction rapidly and profitably. Supply chain quality management (SCQM) is a
system-based approach for performance improvement that leverages opportunities created by upstream
and downstream linkages with suppliers and customers (Foster, 2008). Robinson and Malhotra (2005)
thinks that SCQM is the formal coordination and integration of business processes involving all partner
organizations in the supply channel to measure, analyze and continually improve products, services and
processes in order to create value and achieve satisfaction of intermediate and final customers in the
marketplace. Some of the benefits of BDA in manufacturing include efficiency, defect tracking and
product quality, improvement in product manufacturing process and supply planning (Wang and
Alexander, 2015).

The pervasive diffusion of tools and technologies like cloud computing, mobile technology, social media,
big data, IoT has turned the way people conducted businesses earlier. This is also the fact in case of SCM.
Therefore, it is important to achieve a high level of integration of inter- and intra-organizational processes
and IS in order to attain a greater level of seamless coordination and reduce repeated efforts and related
inefficiencies (Wamba and Akter, 2015). For example, the combination of RFID-enabled intelligent
products and intelligent services with the existing ICT in supply chains should play a facilitating role –
thus making the products and services more visible to supply chain members – and in parallel should
offer more opportunities for quick and efficient supply chain activities (Wamba et al., 2008).

Retail industry has entered in the era of big data as retail transactional databases are generating data with
much priority on five V’s (Verma and Singh, 2017). These databases are beyond the capabilities of
traditional mining approaches to process and manage. Each and every transaction in a retail store is stored
for analysis of customer’s purchase patterns and thus plays an important role in devising strategy for
placement and promotion of products to better satisfy customer expectations and hence to increase
revenues of retailers (Verma et al, 2015). Use of Apriori association mining algorithm is one of the
popular strategies to find frequent item sets in retail databases (Verma and Sing, 2015). But conventional
Apriori suffers from various drawbacks such as resource intensive nature as it requires multiple scans of
databases as well as it is not capable enough to extract unique buying patterns from big databases
(Malhotra and Rishi, 2016). This issue can be handled by Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and
MapReduce architecture based scalable and parallel next generation Apriori algorithm (Verma and Singh,
2017).

There is a close relationship between ICT supply chain and global big data commerce. Supply chain links
and optimizes all aspects such as suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. A large part of their
information gathering, decision making and mutual interaction is pushed by means of big data, which can
be used to anticipate through advanced analytics. For instance, do listening, testing and learning; do
sensing before responding; help adapting to changes; deliver products safety; encourage digital
manufacturing and digital services; and promote supply chain visibility (Cecere, 2012). ICT supply chain
is the carrier of big data, as it is responsible for producing all the software and hardware related to the
production, storage and application of bug data. So, the security problems of ICT supply chain must have
something with big data security (Lu et al., 2013).

The growing needs for customized products and services in many industries and the unprecedented level
of outsourcing have made modern global supply chains more complex than ever before (Giannakis and
Louis, 2016). The increased level of supply chain complexity elevates the degree of uncertainty and risks
that companies are faced with (Manuj and Mentzer, 2008). In order to reduce the level of uncertainty,
organizations can design and manage agile supply chains so that they can responsively fulfill demand
(Braunscheidel and Suresh, 2009). Conventional systems have not provided sustainable solutions for agile
supply chains. The use of multi-agent modeling can be an alternative decision making tool for
collaboration within supply chains. Multi-agent based supply chain system can promote supply chain
agility. Semantic web services and big data can also be incorporated in this system (Giannakis and Louis,
2016).

Because of mass marketing, the market now has the transition from a sellers’ market to a consumer-
driven market. The popularity of mobile internet enables audience to get rid of restrictions and obtain the
desired information anytime, anywhere via mobile internet terminal. Mobile internet changed people’s
shopping habits profoundly from the aspects of information flow, capital flow and logistics, and thus it
has reconstructed supply chain (Ma, Nie and Lu, 2015). Because of the inefficiencies of management,
traditional logistics supply chain platform had been unable to meet the reconstructed supermarket
warehouse type. This problem can be effectively solved by introducing big data and mobile internet
technology into the warehouse type supermarket management system, and by developing intelligent
logistics platform which will act as the core of warehouse type supermarket (Guoxing, 2011).

Conclusion
The main objective of this study was to understand the application of BDA for the optimization of SCM.
In order to accomplish this, an intensive literature review was carried out. The result of the literature
review was reported in three different sections: the main literature review containing the core concepts of
the problem area, findings from the problem solving initiatives and finally discussion of the findings. The
main literature review shows that SCM generates data that are characterized by the 5 V’s of big data.
However, both BDA and SCM can contribute to the competitive advantages of a firm. Analytics is used
in SCM prior to the emergence of BDA. The complexity arose because of the huge quantity of data
generated by SCM compels the companies to embrace BDA. The main findings of this study shows that
big data can be used for risk management, quality management, process management of supply risks,
dynamic integration of analytics processing, security of ICT supply chain, multi-agent based SCM
system, sustainable retail environment, humanitarian supply chain, restructuring of supply chain and
analysis of social media to improve SCM. However, there are more SCM issues where BDA can play an
imperative role but due to the time constraints and other limitations they are beyond the scope of these
work. The knowledge gathered from this state of the art literature review will be used in a later period to
prepare a project proposal in order to implement BDA analytics in a supply chain setting to solve any
particular problem or add competitive advantages over the competitors.
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