Digitalization to Reduce Tasks Without Added Value or Human Contact in a Pandemic

Digitalization is the use of technological innovations within the business context with a major influence on products, services, business processes, sales channels, and supply channels. The associated potential advantages include, among others, increased sales or productivity, innovations in price creation, and new sorts of client interaction. Global enterprises are facing supply chain issues, and consequently, potentially higher operational costs, lower inventory, and the prospects of lower demand will make them reluctant to disburse resources and time to connect in M&A and financing activities, predominantly if valuations of targets remain high. Digitalization of the supply chain (DSC) could be a way that companies can start to strategize and accomplish trade strength against supply chain disturbance. The main focus of this chapter is that digitalization enhances prosperity without human contact in a pandemic, will alter labor markets, and impacts business models.

Digital, Decentralized Supply Chain and Its Implication for B2B Marketing

This chapter discusses the possible effects of decentralized, digital supply chains on B2B marketing. Traditional buying and selling functions will change once large organizations decide to procure from digital platforms. Using the case study of medikabazaar.com, an Indian start-up, the chapter shows that while medical supply purchase will become decentralized, digital platforms will create a new centralization of suppliers and have a significant impact on industrial buying particularly for high value medical equipment purchase in small towns or small hospitals. Organizational buying process will be impacted and companies that choose to supply products directly to hospitals will have to change their marketing strategy suitably.

Security Issues of Blockchain-Based Information System to Manage Supply Chain in a Global Crisis

Global supply chain crisis management has become increasingly crucial for tackling unusual incidents (e.g., natural disaster, terrorism, pandemic). While crisis management has focused on a few organizations involved in supply chain operations (manufacturers, governments, carriers, and the consuming public), it has primarily received a functional focus. Due to their decentralized network structure, supply chains are prone to suffer from disruptive events solved by supply chain crisis management. This chapter presents the blockchain technologies' possibilities and limits used in an integrated IoT-based information system architecture. The chapter describes how the scalability limits of blockchain technology affect the proposed architecture performance that uses it. Also, the chapter presents a review of the academic literature, pointing out how some solutions use a centralization process to improve response time and security of the blockchain-based architecture. Finally, the chapter provides security threat models, which consider by blockchain protocols in IoT networks.

Accelerating the Digitalization of the Supply Chain

The chapter proposes ways to improve the digitalization of supply chains during global crises. After a survey conducted on a sample of 49 logistics professionals, the authors find that today it has become necessary to accelerate the deployment of an advanced digitalization of the supply chain as a whole. Due to the problems encountered during pandemic crises throughout history, especially the COVID-19 crisis, and in today's computerized world, it is needed to transform the supply chains towards 100% digital. In order to do that, first the authors need to study the fluctuations in supply and demand during crises in order to understand the general effect of pandemics on the supply chain. Thereafter, it is necessary to adopt and improve the appropriate IT systems, especially to digitalize the interaction between buyers and suppliers. This will change the purchasing contracts because the buyers have more transparency on the situation of their suppliers since access to information is easier in a digital environment where everything is connected.

Semantically Enhanced Web Service for Global Supply Chain Disruption Management

The recent coronavirus pandemic has now unleashed a global supply chain crisis across a huge number of organizations, stemming from a lack of understanding and flexibility of the multiple layers of their global supply chains and a lack of diversification in their sourcing strategies. One of the technical options to mitigate the pandemic is to automate business processes by which heterogeneous data integration is encouraged. The convergence of Semantic Web with service-oriented computing is manifested by Semantic Web services technology. It addresses the major challenge of automated, interoperable, and meaningful coordination of web service composition in industrial applications – such as apparel business. Automatic service composition may dramatically improve the development efficiency of web service applications. This chapter proposes an approach to automatically process semantic service composition (SSC) using description logics (DLs) to provide well-defined semantics. Also, this chapter explains the role of ontologies in the architecture of the Semantic Web.

Manufacturer Service-Oriented Strategy

This chapter develops a new hybrid manufacturing service-based marketing strategy for manufacturers evolving in a homogenous market. First, by using the Porter's value chain model, it will outline how manufacturers develop their competitive advantages in a normal context and then run the same theoretical analysis in the context of a homogenous market where it is difficult for manufacturers to create a difference. In addition, a qualitative research in the form of semi-conducted interviews with factory executives will confirm the homogeneity of strategies among competitors and outline the importance of developing new strategic directions. The conclusion will show that in order to create competitive advantages without using too many resources, marketing, service management, and technology could work together and lead manufacturers to adopt a more service-based marketing management orientation.

The Influence of Digitization on Supply Chain Sustainable Performance

This chapter intends to explore the influence of digitization on supply chain sustainable performance. An attempt has been made in this chapter, first, to define supply chain management and its practical relevance, then to highlight the different components of the supply chain, and finally, how Industry 4.0 technologies can be used in designing these components so that all the components of the supply chain work in a coordinated manner and that they are effective in achieving the objectives of supply chain sustainability.

The Perspectives of Supply Chain Management Using Natural Knowledge From 3D Blockchain Technologies and Avatar-Based and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

The blockchain restores control and ownership of information back to its rightful owner, thus eliminating dependencies on central authorities and third parties. These material chains are immensely complex; they can be subject to the laws and regulations of more than 200 countries and territories, and they are heavily influenced by many different factors ranging from freight consolidation to the timing of hundreds of concurrent shipments. This chapter is about algorithmic modeling of supply chain management using natural knowledge from a 3D-hybrid blockchain as a dragon chain.