SUPPLY CHAIN AND SERVICE OPERATIONS DIGITIZATION: AN INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

The rapid digitization of industry has increased both efficiencies and challenges for the field of supply chain management. While the incremental use of digital technologies and the amount of data made available through digitization provides various benefits to supply chain value creation, there are challenges regarding the rapid digitization of this field. Organizations still face the challenges of implementing and utilizing digital technologies as well as extracting knowledge from data throughout the supply chain network. Although previous research has been conducted on business applications in various industries, digital technologies literature is still in its infancy. Despite the interest of both scholars and practitioners, there are minimal insights into avenues to assess the importance of industry- and field-applications as well as technologies and topics from both a scholarly and practitioner standpoint. Furthermore, as knowledge management enhances the advantages of collaborative supply chain practices, in order to ensure optimization of supply chain digitization, applying knowledge management to the specific industry- and field-applications, as well as technologies and topics, will be necessary. Therefore, with all the data made available, understanding how to extract, share, and use knowledge is becoming more important and fundamental. Thus, this study aims to propose an integration of supply chain digitization and knowledge management, to present the prevalence and growth in industry applications, technologies, and topics in order to proliferate greater scholarly insight into practical application, and to add to theoretical knowledge by the exploration of the relationships of digital technologies on Nonaka\u27s SECI framework (Nonaka, 1994). Furthermore, future research inquiries are developed based on the results of the research questions regarding prevalence and growth between scholars and practitioners to contribute to how scholars can utilize the largely new emerging areas of supply chain digitization to broaden their perspectives and leverage knowledge management to enhance the supply chain digitization research paradigm. More specifically this research aims to explore the role of digitization through digital technologies having a potential to support socialization and engagement for the purposes of sharing tacit knowledge. Thus, the following research questions of ‘how do organizations conduct socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization?’ and ‘how does digitization induce and/or maintain movement between the four modes in the SECI model?’ are also examined