Impact of big data analytics on supply chain performance: an analysis of influencing factors

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the impact of big data analytics on the retail supply chain. For doing so, we set our context to select the best big data practices amongst the available alternatives based on retail supply chain performance. We have applied TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for Interactive Multi-criteria Decision Making) for the selection of the best big data analytics tools among the identified nine practices (data science, neural networks, enterprise resource planning, cloud computing, machine learning, data mining, RFID, Blockchain and IoT and Business intelligence) based on seven supply chain performance criteria (supplier integration, customer integration, cost, capacity utilization, flexibility, demand management, and time and value). One of the intriguing understandings from this paper is that most of the retail firms are in a dilemma between customer loyalty and cost while implementing the big data practices in their organization. This study analyses the dominance of the big data practices at the retail supply chain level. This helps the newly emerging retail firms in evaluating the best big data practice based on the importance and dominance of supply chain performance measures.