The new digital tools can significantly improve the performance of supply chains. That means, the digitalization has the potential to provide companies with a range of practices to significantly reduce costs, increase product availability, improve access to information, and enhance responsiveness, collaboration, supply chain visibility, and resilience. One of the potentials of the digitalization is to explore big data. In fact, the quantitative explosion of data gave birth to big data in order to find new ways of analyzing and exploring the data. It offers the possibility to treat and analyze a huge amount of data in order to make conclusions and take decisions. Benefits such as cost reducing, better management, or even precise forecasting are possible with the big data. But a lot of companies have faced big problems such as data leaking and privacy violation. This chapter will study big data supply chain management and its legal context based on a literature review and gives future directions for governments, companies, and researchers.
TopIntroduction
The arrival of the internet can be considered as the beginning of digitization. However, real digitalization has started with the integration of digital technologies into business processes with the aim of improving them. In reality, digitalization transforms all core businesses into advanced forms. It is a process that aims to improve the performance of the processes of an organization.
The globalization of industries formed supply chains, which represent all processes required to deliver a product or service to customers (Nadia et al., 2020). To manage these processes in harmony the supply chain management was born as a solution to manage the interaction between global companies and to offer the companies multi factors of competitiveness. However, the growth of the international business has created strong competition in the market. In addition, supply chain management also needs to deal with the difficulties that face supply chain managers and researchers, including complexity, conflicting objectives, dynamic environment and sources of risks, in addition to making their supply chains more competitive (Taghipour and Frayret, 2011).
With the introduction of the technology, many changes and improvements have occurred. The companies saw a great opportunity with the development of all the technologies during the past decades to take a competitive advantage and to surpass the competition. First, with the internet, companies could access information and develop their website to add value to their products and services in order to attract clients. Then the digitalization and the digital transformation, which allowed the companies to transcend their own concept and reach step by step more efficiency (Taghipour and Merimi, 2021).
Today, in this competitive environment, it is necessary to use technology to develop a new business model, and thus maintain a sustainable competitive advantage (Saeed and Kersten, 2019). The goal of every company is to optimize workflows and satisfy the customer’s needs in terms of quality, quantity, price and delivery time (Taghipour et al., 2021). The transformation of a traditional supply chain into a digital supply chain means digitalizing an integrated system that interconnects all actors to avoid the loss of time and money, improving business performance and being environmentally friendly (Devins et al., 2017). According to a Forbes Insights survey, 65% of managers want to transform their business models in the digital age. Therefore, it is necessary to know how emerging technologies can be used in these processes to gain a competitive advantage. In this context, one of the emerging technologies is Big Data, which can offer a series of benefits in terms of capacity to collect and analyze information. Bigdata is the tool that can help a company reach a near perfect functioning (Farouk and Zhen, 2019). This article, after exploring the big data in the context of supply chain management, studies characteristics as well as the benefits of such a tool and its utilization in a legal context to define a way of application of the bigdata that won’t be against the countries’ regulations.