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

Introduction

Digitalization is that the use of technological innovations within the business context with a major influence on product, 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 (Urbach & Ahlemann, 2019, p.7). Value as digitalization and sensible automation progress, several can see their jobs altered. Advances in automation and digital technologies can mean that individuals can more and more work side by side with robots, sensible automation and artificial intelligence. Humans and machines combined will generate additional price than either one alone. Supply chains area unit a backbone of economies and society, and mostly act with nature. The interactions in these supply chain ecosystems area unit terribly advanced and triggered by mutual interrelations and feedbacks between supply chains, nature, society, and also the economy. (Christopher and Towill 2000; Lee 2004;Goldsby et al. 2006; Eckstein et al. 2015;Gunasekaran et al. 2016;Dubey et al. 2018; Fadaki et al. 2020). In a dynamic environment, supply chains are networks of independent firms. The aim of supply chain management is to bring these businesses together in a fast-paced environment (Taghipour & Frayret, 2011). Supply chain management is important for managing the use of resources and information by using coordination mechanisms to organize independent companies (Taghipour, 2014). The speedy expansion of Internet provides the world enormous achievements both in social and economic life in the twenty-first century. Digitalization has an influential impact on the economy. The Supply chains and operations management community has created impressive methodical fundamentals, techniques and tools for sustainability and digitalization of Supply chains for the last three decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a series of novel challenges for Supply chains and operations management which lead to an understudied research and academic area (Ivanov, D; 2020). Digitalization plays a vital role on recent competitive market and it is linked with the utilization of digital technologies to alter business model and to convey new value-producing opportunities to the modern business environment in an aim to move towards a digital business (Mihardjo et al. 2019).Isolation measures executed universally to contain the outbreak have hit financial activity difficult, whereas the sharp disintegration in business and consumer confidence, compounded by recent financial market turmoil, will proceed to decrease optional spending and investment. One major uncertainty concerns the duration of the current outbreak and the plausibility of further waves. The east to west development of the epicenter of the emergency which has immersed Europe and presently parts of the US, highlights how nations are a distinctive stages in managing with the outbreak, meaning that supply and demand issues in specific markets could have long tail impacts for worldwide businesses. Global enterprises are facing supply chain issues, consequently potentially higher operational costs, lower inventory and the prospects of lower demand will be reluctant to disburse resources and time to connect in M&A and financing activities, predominantly if valuations of targets remain high. Digitalization of supply chain could be a way that companies can start to strategize and accomplish trade strength against supply chain disturbance. In this context, enormous information analytics can assist firms in streamlining their supplier selection process, cloud-computing is progressively being used to encourage and manage supplier connections and logistics and shipping forms can be significantly improved through automation and the internet of things (McKenzie, B. 2020).

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak depicts that pandemics and epidemics can badly bring havoc on supply chains around the world (Queiroz et al. 2020). The aim of this chapter is to look at the Digitalization to reduce tasks without added value or human contact in a pandemic. In this chapter, following topics will be focused:

• 1.

  Digitalization enhances prosperity without human contact in a pandemic.

• 2.

  Digitalization will alter labor markets.

• 3.

  Digitalization impacts business models.

• 4.

  Factors influencing digitalization to reduce tasks in supply chain management.

• 5.

  Impediments of digitalization of supply chain to reduce task.

  • Keywords: Digitalization, Supply Chain, sustainability, Technological Innovations, Supply channels, Operations management, COVID-19, Pandemic, Artificial intelligence.