Supply Chain in the Cloud: Opportunities, Barriers, and a Generic Treatment

Abstract

Cloud concept is directly related with the beyond-ERP integrity and collaboration across a number of heterogeneous Supply Chain (SC) partner infrastructures. The technology enables partners to form a collaborative SC community without the burden of significant IT investment. Cloud applications offer significant opportunities from SC perspective, and the assimilation of the Cloud Technology is not complete yet in the Supply Chain domain. It also involves various barriers from implementation perspective, as well as the concerns related with vendor lock-in, security, reliability, privacy and data ownership. This chapter provides a comprehensive coverage of the opportunities and barriers as well as the generic treatment from SC perspective. It also highlights how the cloud technology represents a perfect fit with the ideas of 'Collaborative Supply Chains', 'Business Process Outsourcing' and 'long-term strategic partnerships, which are the key themes characterizing the Supply Chains of today's era. This chapter reveals that the intersection of the topics 'Cloud computing' and 'Supply Chain' is a promising area for further research. Further studies in a multi-partner setting with respect to a variety of configurations, case studies and applications, as well as the security, reliability and data ownership issues are justified. © 2015 by IGI Global. All rights reserved.