Today's and Tomorrow's Mobile Technologies in Supply Chains

摘要

The advance of mobile technologies has attracted much attention in recent years. The competitive environment forces many companies to involve the latest mobile technologies and systems in their supply chains especially where customer focus is the main issue. Here the main motivation is that the industry players need a systematic approach to be able to maintain their position and grow in the market by responding to customer demands more quickly with lower costs in total. Therefore, significance of a well-managed supply chain has been growing day by day and mobile technologies including smartphones, tablets, mobile applications and lastly Internet of Things (IoT) have already become one of the most important parts of supply chain management. This results in a new definition as "mobile supply chain management". To understand its benefits, the drivers of mobile supply chain management are explained in detail by giving their use areas in the industry reviewing literature remarkably. At the final stage, new trends and proposals are stated by considering mobile technologies taking new grounds in supply chain management and future topics such as robotics and autonomous vehicles are mentioned as well. In this paper, it is aimed to explain the role of mobile devices, applications and IoT well in terms of characteristics of mobile supply chain management.