Big Data Enabled Supply Chain Management

The buzz about Big Data and business intelligence (BI) as drivers of business information data collection and analysis continues to build steam. However, it seems not everyone is taking notice. Whilst scholars in main are excited about the “fields of possibilities” big data and related analytics offer, in terms of optimising firm capabilities, supply chain scholars have been surprisingly quiet. In this work we hope to break this silence and we achieve this through a comprehensive survey of the literature with the aim of exposing the dynamics of big data analytics in the supply chain context. With state of the art data analytics and visualisations, our findings suggest that the benefits of a big data driven supply chain are many on the proviso that organisations can overcome their own myopic understanding of this socio-technical phenomenon. On the issue of diffusion, our findings show a dearth of studies from scholars on the African continent. Further studies would significantly add to the emerging body of knowledge by considering the pros and cons of adopting big data strategies for supply chains in the context of small island developing states, such as the Seychelles.