The Current State of Information Flows in Supply Chains

What is it about?

The goal of this work was assessing the current state of the art regarding security and reliability of information flows in supply chains. As information flows, we consider low-level data exchanges along supply chains, for example real-time monitoring of goods. To this end, we reviewed over a decade of literature, focusing on survey articles. Our results unearth an initially unexpected technological gap: While computer science has intensively researched technical building blocks to protect data in various scenarios in terms of security, privacy, and resilience, these technical advances have not yet found widespread applications in protecting information flows in supply chains. To help remedy this situation in the future, we derive a taxonomy for describing characteristics of supply-chain data flows, discuss the applicability of technical building blocks in this domain, and propose future research directions toward closing this gap.

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Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash

Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash

Why is it important?

As global supply chains become evermore complex, digital data exchanges play an increasingly crucial role in ensuring that they can continue to operate fluently. Hence, integrating technical advances to ensure the reliability of supply-chain information flows becomes increasingly important as well. Our work highlights that this demand is not satisfied and calls for further action to reduce the risks associated with unreliable information flows.