Accelerating the Digitalization of the Supply Chain: An Empirical Research About COVID-19 Crisis

Introduction

The Coronavirus is a reminder of the globalization of the outsourcing of activities, the development of collaborative models (Taghipour, 2009), customer and supplier integration (Mbiatem et al., 2018), the continuous search for competitiveness, and the development and research of new technologies. This made the Supply Chain at the same time the real engine for companies, a distinguishing factor face to face of their customers and one of their greatest risks in case of weakness. The COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis, but its consequences are also economic.

Today's supply chains are highly sophisticated and innovative and are critical to the competitiveness of many organizations. But their global correlations and interactions make them increasingly fragile on a scale of risk, with more potential fading points and a smaller margin of error to reduce business disruptions and delays (Taghipour, 2014a). Efforts over the years to optimize the supply chain to reduce costs, decrease inventory and increase asset utilization have mainly squeezed out the room and flexibility needed to control delays and disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis demonstrated that many companies are unaware of how fragile they are to global shocks of abundance because of the relationships within their supply chain.

Advantageously, new technologies and techniques are making their approach, greatly improving visibility and clarity throughout the supply chain and promoting greater resilience and agility, without the collective costs associated with traditional risk management approaches (Ren et al., 2016). The traditional view of the linear supply chain and its improvement for organizations is giving way to digital supply networks, where functional silos are broken down within the enterprise and all parties are connected to the entire supply network, allowing for complete visibility, responsiveness, participation, agility and improvement (Taghipour, 2014b). Increasingly, these digital supply networks are generated and created in order to anticipate disruptions and reorganize themselves appropriately to mitigate their impact.

In 2016, a study conducted by GT Nexus and Capgemini revealed that 70% of governments had approached projects related to digital change. The document states that by 2021, the general use of data between suppliers, companies and customers will have evolved considerably. Indeed, the field of supply chain has the characteristic of being strongly divided. Both from the actors' point of view (different providers) and from the IT point of view (each one works with its own application). Excellent communication will therefore allow for simplification and fluidity of the information sharing between the different parties as well as the logistic flows (Tliche et al., 2019). Particularly thanks to techniques that allow real-time monitoring of processes. Thus, what brings us to know the supply problems in connection with the covid-19 crisis, and why it is necessary to accelerate the digitalization of the supply chain?

In this chapter, first, we will review the literature, then present and analyze the results of our questionnaire, the recommendations, and limitations of the study.