Rethinking supply chains in the age of digitalization

Digitalization is the use and adoption of external digital technologies (i.e. resources (such as machine learning, IoT, big data and blockchain)) by organizations, to improve their supply chain and operational performance. Whilst there is a lot of emphasis on the strategic adoption of digital technologies, the work on operational feasibility, maturity and supply chain implementation is scarce. Where it does exist, the work to date, we believe to be speculative and more concerned with ‘readiness’. There is a dearth of operational evidence of genuine cases of product/process implementation. Therefore, the scope of this special issue is focused on the contribution that PPC methods can play in understanding digitalization, its feasibility, maturity and integration into operations and supply chain management. Furthermore, the focus is on understanding the organizational conditions facilitating supply chain and production digitalization and its role in performance improvement. All of the articles submitted and included in the special issue went through a single-blind review process. Initially, we had 23 original submissions; these were reduced down to 11 papers that met PPC quality and editorial requirements. They covered a variety of topics including: ‘sea-land supply chains’; ‘manufacturing’; ‘performance measurement’; ‘business intelligence’; ‘service supply chains’; ‘relational mechanisms’; ‘value creation’ and ‘service quality’