Status-Quo of IoT in Supply Chain Management - Applications, Potentials and Challenges in Austria: Status-Quo of IoT in Supply Chain Management

Abstract

The complexity and uncertainty in Supply Chain Management (SCM) has grown radically over the last years. New technologies provide an avenue for improving SCM activities. In particular, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) is one of the technological advances that has received quite some attention in SCM literature. However, especially for smaller countries such as Austria, the actual status of IoT application in SCM is low and research is often limited to analyzing theoretical potentials. The current paper elaborates the status-quo of IoT in eight different industries in Austria by means of expert interviews. Results show, that IoT is only applied in a very limited way. Still, practitioners agree that it offers huge potential, e.g., to increase supply chain transparency, improve planning in SCM or provide real-time information as basis for risk handling. The main benefits of IoT are seen in form of improved process quality, higher level of customer satisfaction due to tracking and tracing, provision of additional real time data, and the creation of digital supply chain twins. Each analyzed company plans to implement IoT in SCM in the future. The paper provides several starting points for practitioners aiming to implement IoT in SCM. Our results also provide several opportunities for future research, e.g., to compare our findings for Austria with findings from other countries with especial focus on SMEs.