Supply chain risk management automation: A literature review

Abstract

In today’s highly perturbed supply chains, it is crucial to effectively manage the risk of interrupting business continuity. In recent years, an expanding body of literature has emerged on how to automate supply chain risk management (SCRM) by applying Industry 4.0 technologies. This paper provides a first systematic review of SCRM automation (SCRMA) literature. We firstly conducted a structured review of 171 papers to support a descriptive analysis, which was further narrowed to 51 papers to support our content analysis. We analyzed which of the five stages of SCRMA, namely risk detection, assessment, mitigation, monitoring, and handling, is supported by which of the nine different technology groups. Overall, it emerges that SCRMA implementation is still at a very early stage: this provides a broad range of developments to researchers, but it also suggests managers to invest carefully in those technologies that do not seem fully mature for practical utilization, yet. Finally, this review uncovers under-investigated areas in current SCRMA research and outlines promising future research directions.