Achieving sustainable performance in a data-driven agriculture supply chain: A review for research and applications

Abstract

The lack of industrialization, inadequacy of the management, information inaccuracy, and inefficient supply chains are the significant issues in an agri-food supply chain. The proposed solutions to overcome these challenges should not only consider the way the food is produced but also take care of societal, environmental and economic concerns. There has been increasing use of emerging technologies in the agriculture supply chains. The internet of things, the blockchain, and big data technologies are potential enablers of sustainable agriculture supply chains. These technologies are driving the agricultural supply chain towards a digital supply chain environment that is data-driven. Realizing the significance of a data-driven sustainable agriculture supply chain we extracted and reviewed 84 academic journals from 2000 to 2017. The primary purpose of the review was to understand the level of analytics used (descriptive, predictive and prescriptive), sustainable agriculture supply chain objectives attained (social, environmental and economic), the supply chain processes from where the data is collected, and the supply chain resources deployed for the same. Based on the results of the review, we propose an application framework for the practitioners involved in the agri-food supply chain that identifies the supply chain visibility and supply chain resources as the main driving force for developing data analytics capability and achieving the sustainable performance. The framework will guide the practitioners to plan their investments to build a robust data-driven agri-food supply chain. Finally, we outline the future research directions and limitations of our study.