Challenges and opportunities of cloud adoption in supply chain management: A swot analysis model

Abstract

The contemporary volatile business environment forces firms to seek for IT solutions that will offer flexibility at the level of their supply chain. The main aim of firms is to improve business processes without increasing costs or sacrificing quality. Although cloud computing may support this kind of flexibility, offering advantages like (pay per use model, scalability and information sharing), it also involves many constraints (performance issues, legislation and government laws, locked in data to one provider). Therefore, stakeholders should choose when and why to move business processes to the cloud. To examine these issues, this paper uses a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis model in order to review and explain the advantages and constraints of cloud computing in the internal and external environment of a firm. SWOT analysis is a very helpful tool for decision-making regarding IT implementation issues and it can be used to analyze the impact of cloud computing solutions on organizations and their supply chains. Based on an extensive literature review, this paper aims to provide a theoretical base for the analysis and evaluation of the complexity of factors that affect the final decision of a firm, regarding the potential adoption of cloud-based solutions by supply chain members.