Internet of things and its challenges in supply chain management; a rough strength-relation analysis method

Abstract

Internet of Things application (IOT) in supply chain management is becoming imperative and can shape a strategic competitive advantage. Albeit, different challenges appear through this application, most of the previous studies consider less about these challenges and focus on the advantages of IOT. To overcome this defect, different challenges that a supply chain may face as whole are determined based on systematic literature review and expert opinions. Then, a rough group decision-making and trial evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is applied. Advantages of the proposed model are that both internal strength and external influence of challenges and also vagueness and ambiguity of experts’ opinions are simultaneously noticed to completely show the importance of these challenges. The results show that challenges such as lack of strategy and scenario planning in IOT, storage issues, lack of security and lack of privacy are of great importance. So, these challenges should have a higher priority in attracting attention and resources. These results help managers to be equipped to face with main challenges in their path toward IOT in their supply chains. Accordingly some practical suggestions for managers are discussed in this paper, such as starting the journey toward IOT step by step, planning for a data storage system which is appropriate for big data, setting up a security policy to prevent out-coming problems caused by lack of security and privacy inherited by IOT, conducting a privacy or security risk assessment, minimizing the data collection and retain and testing the security measures before launching the products, and establishment of a legal framework to construct a problem-solving network in such a messed up and dynamic environment for processing such complicated huge data.