Imagine a world, where everything is connected to an intelligent network and everything is synchronized to work autonomously. Such a world will surely emerge in the future and it will surely bring business opportunities. Today, we can see the change in business strategies and methods that have led to more productivity and efficiency.

This change has been injected through the Internet Of Things (IoT) and AI-based technologies that are digitizing every modern business through connected networks and smart devices. It has revolutionalized, the business paradigm and induced digital strategies to its applications. One of the important sectors in businesses worldwide is the supply chain market and IoT has made significant inroads in this market too.

Evolution Of Supply Chain Markets:

The evolution of the supply chain market has gone through three phases, the logistics management phase, the value chain phase, and the supply chain network phase. Supply chain management is the integration of the concept of resource integration, advanced information technology, and supply chain from origin to ultimate customer to provide seamless supply and customer satisfaction. With the emergence of the e-commerce market, supply chain digitization has gained momentum.

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The overall logistics and supply chain market has seen leaps in profits and revenues due to the advent of online technologies. Enterprises in the supply chain start to focus on the improvement of the overall performance of the entire supply chain to actualize close coordination and seamless connection of node enterprises.

IoT and Supply Chain Management (SCM):

IoT technologies which is a network of connected devices has helped SCM to integrate, intelligent management of supply chain through virtualizations and stability of the supply chain. IoT can provide the connection of various objects at any time and any place, and also the status and related information of any object at any time and any location. Using RFID tags, wireless sensors and limit switches to trace, record and analyze data from various phases and parts of the supply chain.

Virtualization Enhancement:

With IoT and the application of RFID technology and wireless sensors can provide accurate information regarding the variety, quantity, customer, location, and other related details of products to management in supply chain, enhancing the level of transparency, and visualization throughout the entire process, and more importantly, the whole supply chain.

It helps real-time monitoring of supply chain units and help optimize channels through which supply chain works. Virtualization enhancement can help simulate the supply chain process and help identify loopholes to be rectified for better efficiencies and productivity.

Stability of SCM:

One of the most important factors in SCM is to induce stability in its operations and reduce supply lead time to improve the overall supply chain. This can be achieved through information sharing mechanisms and intelligent management.

With the help of IoT technologies, precise management of the quantity, variety, quality, and batch information of raw materials can be also realized, with accurate information regarding the storage location of raw materials or spare parts being provided.

According to the data collected, scheduled inventory refills can be organized and in turn, shortening of production cycle, decrease of cost, inventory, capital occupation, and eventually supply chain uncertainty can be achieved.

IoT can help enterprises and businesses achieve warehouse management, which is an important factor when it comes to supply chain management. Further, information like warehousing, storage location, and quantity can be achieved, which will be prompt, accurate, and complete, reflecting the real-time inventory status.

Intelligent Management:

The development of IoT technology provides technical support for intelligent management of the supply chain. Intelligent management of the supply chain has been successful in countries like India.

According to the report by Techcrunch, the new round of the largest for any B2B e-commerce platform in India has valued the ‘Udaan’ start-up between $2.3 billion and $2.7 billion. ‘Udaan’ is a supply chain management app that helps retail businesses to replenish inventories at cheaper rates.

Enterprises can optimize IoT based solutions by hire indian developers who are experts in such apps development. IoT can achieve intelligent management of supply chain, through the installation and application of a variety of sensing devices (such as RFID, sensors, etc.), real-time supply chain operation status can be sensed; when the environment changes, sensed information can be provided to supply chain system timely.

Then develop robust systems that can store such a large amount of information and record each data. Further, using IoT based analytics to analyze BigData and produce an environment for intelligent and efficient supply chain management using technologies like mass data storage technology, data fusion technology, and data mining technology.

Security Issues and Implications:

Risk assessment in the IoT ecosystem is quite important as a simple malicious attack can lead to physical damages, operational disruption, danger to human safety, etc. To avoid such consequences, it is important to identify the threats and threat vectors. For example, a malfunctioning of heating or cooling systems may result is sudden power surges resulting in breakdowns. It may cause a significant loss of revenue as well as damage to the power system.

Monetary Loss: Any damage to infrastructure can lead to monetary losses through high lead time and revenue loss due to inventory damage. This can be avoided through robust systems that can be controlled and monitored constantly.
Control issues: IoT devices are in the development phase, as of now and thus it is quite possible that complete access and control over them is not possible, which may prove fatal for the enterprises.
CyberSecurity issues: It is important to realize that IoT devices will have different authentication and access mechanism at place for security purposes, which is different from conventional systems and this should be backed up by equally robust cybersecurity systems.
Administration issues: With IoT devices, connected to an open-source or cloud, there are security concerns with no administrative control or monitoring over dataflow and transmission.

Concluding lines:

There is no doubt that IoT is the future of supply chain management systems and is bound to grow over time. But, it is equally important to raise the security of such technologies to avoid losses and other implications. As technology advances, logistics and supply chain management will get smarter, intelligent and more efficient. Customers also have faith in IoT technologies and absorbing the same for your systems can generate value among customers and increase your brand value too.