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Top1. Introduction
A fierce competition is shaping the markets today with informed customers resulting in volatile demands of products. The batch sizes have reduced with increased variability. There is a paradigm shift observed in modern business management where businesses no longer compete as individual isolated entities but as supply chains (Lambert & Cooper, 2000). The collaboration will continue to be the key to success in the current environment wherein the longevity of the business will be decided by its capability to integrate and network business relationships (Lambert, Cooper, & Pagh, 1998). Organizations are making significant efforts to understand customer needs and subsequently align them to the organizational goals for achieving the decisive competitive edge over their competitors. The organizations essentially need to make their goods and services available at the most appropriate place, time, and price. Supply Chain plays a crucial role in achieving this organizational goal (Lou et al., 2011). Supply Chain, a term used in logistics, deals with the entire movement of raw material from the first supplier through the chain of suppliers, and finally ends with the finished product reaching the consumer. Supply Chain fundamentally links the supplier, organization, and customer, where the activities performed could be within or outside the organizations. It enables value in the complete Chain, making products available, and providing services to the end customer (Cox, 1999).
Industry 4.0 revolutionized the business with digital technologies becoming an integral part of the business process management. Industry 4.0 is characterized by cyber-physical systems. Internet, due to its pervasive presence and its impact on the business processes, has scored an undeniable position in the environment. The Internet has grown exponentially from a small research network to a macro network existing worldwide, serving billions of users in the past few decades (Kopetz, 2011). This worldwide network gave a boost to the technologies that relied on the Internet, such as the Internet of Things. Steenstrup and Kutnick (2015), define IoT as “a network of dedicated physical objects (things) that contain embedded technology to sense or interact with their internal state or the external environment.” Rio and Banker (2014) define “IoT as connecting intelligent physical entities (sensors, devices, machines, assets, and products) to each other, to Internet services, and to applications.” IoT advancements have made the physical world connect to any eco-system through the Internet. The things, i.e., sensors involved in the IoT landscape, have become more and more participative in the eco-system contributing to the business processes. With the help of IoT, things, and people can now be connected anywhere, anytime, and ideally with anyone using the network path for any service (Sundmaeker et al., 2010).
This research study aims to assess the impact of IoT origin data on the effectiveness of collaborative supply chain management with internal and external aligned parameters explicitly applied to the automotive industry in India. The study encompasses the empirical analysis to recommend the best alternative model of the supply chain from the customer and vendor perspective. In the case of an organization, Internal alignment parameters are those parameters that are under the direct control of the organization and play a role in the collaborative supply chain. These parameters are internal to the organization, but any measure taken to increase the efficiency of these directly affects the organization and supply chain (Lou et al., 2011; Ben-Daya et al., 2017). While External alignment parameters are those parameters that are acting outside the organization but are an integral part of the collaborative supply chain. Any adverse impact on these parameters affects the organization negatively (Gustafsson, Edvardsson & Brax, 2005; Reck, 1991; Gubbi et al., 2013; Stefanović & Stefanović, 2011).