The impacts of Information system on supply chain flexibility and its opportunities and challenges

Abstract: Problem – Despite supply chain flexibility is recognized as a competitive advantage in today’s business, and supply chain information system is one of the most critical tool to facilitate flexibility. There is no consensus or comprehensive description on how information system tailor with and work on supply chain flexibility to achieve better dynamic capability. Most of literatures mainly focus on single research area rather than explore the relationship between them. Hence, both theory and industry are strongly calling for research to fill the gap. Purpose – The purpose of the thesis is to develop a conceptual model to describe how SCF and SCIS are related to each other in order to enhance supply chain management and effectively and efficiently respond to the uncertain market. Accordingly, three research questions are formulated to achieve this research purpose: Research question 1: What is supply chain flexibility(SCF)? Research question 2: What is the interrelation between supply chain information system(SCIS) and SCF, especially how does SCIS impact on SCF? Research question 3: What is the opportunity and challenge of SCIS for supporting SCF? Method – The work is consisted of theoretical work and empirical data collection. Literature study is the basis of building conceptual framework and interaction model, multiple case study is conducted to compare and verify models that are built. Results – The supply chain flexibility is redefined as “the ability of companies to effectively and efficiently respond to uncertain customer requirements in order to acquire competitive advantages by making changes, such as adjusting the resources, process and even the supply chain configuration.” Two conceptual models are developed which define a series of IS activities to state the interrelation between SCIS and SCF from the perspectives of IS provider and IS users. In addition, two main megatrends: complete digitization and machine learning, and some challenges of SCIS for promoting SCF are presented