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1. Introduction
Supply chain management (SCM) speaks of “having the right item in the right quantity at the right time at the right place for the right price in the right condition to the right customer” (Mallik, 2010). However, due to the complexity, uncertainty, and other factors involved, most of the real supply chains are known for having many supply-demand mismatch problems such as overstocking, stockout, and delivery delays which have long been popular research topics in the business management literature (Wong et al., 2012).
As always, cheaper, faster, and better has been the mantra for supply chain managers. Meanwhile, supply chains are becoming more complex, costly, uncertain, and vulnerable. To deal effectively with the increasing challenges, supply chains must become a lot smarter (Butner, 2010). Taking full advantage of improvements in such areas as semiconductor, computer science, and other engineering technologies, the new version of supply chain seeks to establish a large-scale intelligent infrastructure for merging data, information, physical objects, products, and business processes together (Schuster et al., 2007). For example, the factories equipped with smart equipment and instruments can fulfill orders with global teams, intelligent analytics, and dynamic systems all across the farthest stages of the value chain (Hessman, 2013). For sure, companies that take advantage of these aforementioned capabilities stand to gain against competitors that do not. No wonder there are abundant examples of smart supply chain applications in existence, for example, smart transportation management system, and smart factory.
In the literature, a number of distinctive terms were used to describe the new communicated global business systems to fulfill customer orders, such as e-supply chain (Akyuz and Rehan, 2009), ambient intelligence (Kloch et al., 2010), Internet of Things (IoT) (Ma, 2011), industrial internet (Evans and Annunziata, 2012), physical internet (Montreuil, 2011), smart factory (Hessman, 2013), smart environment (Weiser et al., 1999), and smarter supply chain (Butner, 2010). While e-commerce promotes transactions performed on the traditional internet, the concept of “e-supply chain” makes one further step to integrate processes across supply chain stages (Akyuz and Rehan, 2009). Further, IoT refers to the next generation internet where connecting physical things through a network has the capability of exchanging information about themselves and their surroundings (Gubbi et al., 2013). These...