Artificial Intelligence Review (2023) 56:S253–S284

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-023-10505-4

Big data optimisation and management in supply chain

management: a systematic literature review

Idrees Alsolbi1,2 · Fahimeh Hosseinnia Shavaki2 · Renu Agarwal3 ·

Gnana K Bharathy4 · Shiv Prakash5 · Mukesh Prasad2

Accepted: 12 May 2023 / Published online: 24 June 2023

© The Author(s) 2023, corrected publication 2023

Abstract
The increasing interest from technology enthusiasts and organisational practitioners in
big data applications in the supply chain has encouraged us to review recent research
development. This paper proposes a systematic literature review to explore the available
peer-reviewed literature on how big data is widely optimised and managed within the sup-
ply chain management context. Although big data applications in supply chain manage-
ment appear to be often studied and reported in the literature, different angles of big data
optimisation and management technologies in the supply chain are not clearly identified.
This paper adopts the explanatory literature review involving bibliometric analysis as the
primary research method to answer two research questions, namely: (1) How to optimise
big data in supply chain management? and (2) What tools are most used to manage big
data in supply chain management? A total of thirty-seven related papers are reviewed to
answer the two research questions using the content analysis method. The paper also re-
veals some research gaps that lead to prospective future research directions.

Keywords Big data · Big data optimization · Big data management · Supply chain
management · Performance measurement · Systematic review

1 Introduction

The technologies continue to rapidly change to meet the 21st century corporate needs world-
wide. With this growth, professionals from various organisations started to understand the
values of applying big data concepts. One major value of applying big data analytics is to
improve the process of making decisions on supply chain configurations (Gupta et al. 2019;
Nguyen et al. 2018). Business entities are increasingly overwhelmed by the stream of end-
less data overflowing from an extensive range of channels. Companies that capitalise on
such data and use it for decision-making end up gaining a competitive advantage, particu-
larly streamlining their end-to-end supply chain functions(Govindan et al. 2018; Nguyen
et al. 2018). Supply chain functions refer to procurement, manufacturing, warehousing,

Extended author information available on the last page of the article

S254 I. Alsolbi et al.

logistics and transportation, and demand management (Nguyen et al. 2018). For example,
one value of applying big data in supply chain management (SCM) is to improve customers’
satisfaction by predicting orders, leading to reducing prices and control risks (Govindan et
al. 2018).
The term “big data” can be defined as an increasingly growing volume of data from dif-
ferent sources with various structures that noticeably challenges industrial organisations on
the one hand and presents them with a complex range of valuable storage and analysis capa-
bilities on the other hand (Addo-Tenkorang and Helo 2016). Besides, big data comprises
information collected from internet-enabled electronic devices such as tablets and smart-
phones, especially voice recordings, videos, and social media (Chen et al. 2015). “SCM”
is generally defined as the management of relationship flow as well as the flow of material,
information, and resources within and across a network, including upstream and down-
stream organisations (Rai 2019).
Big data is accelerating the evolution of supply chain design and management (Tao et al.
2018). Also, big data analytics can enhance capacity utilisation, enable companies to create
new business models, improve customer experience, reduce fraud, improve supplier quality
level, and expand end-to-end supply chain visibility facilitating prescriptive and predic-
tive analytics (Zhan and Tan 2020). Top executives rely on big data analytics for decision-
making to enhance visibility and provide more comprehensive insights on overall SCM.
The large data sets with enhanced variability and variety are generated to enable analysts
to identify any anomalies and patterns and make predictive insights to improve the SCM
practice (Barbosa et al. 2018). Big data has enabled companies to adopt a responsive sup-
ply chain, especially understanding market trends and customer behaviours allowing them
to predict demand in the market (Nguyen et al. 2018; Zhan and Tan 2020). Therefore, the
effective utilisation of big data in supply chain operations leads to an increasing in the value
of organisations by processing proper decisions (Govindan et al. 2018). The low uptake of
big data analytics has been attributed to the firm’s minimal capacity to identify suitable data
and data security threats.
In particular, the significant data optimisation foundation is to find an alternative means
to achieve higher performance considering the cost-effective conditions. Also, optimisation
means doing the best strategy related to a set of selected constraints, which include signifi-
cant factors such as reliability, productivity, efficiency, longevity, strength, and utilization
(Roy et al. 2018) introduced a survey that shows certain optimisation technologies and the
associated useful applications for many organisations.
An example of using optimization in supply chain is found in Amazon, which has revo-
lutionized the game by providing extremely fast delivery timeframes and alerts for projected
delivery times and minute-by-minute tracking. Moreover, every step of UPS’s shipping pro-
cess includes supply chain data analysis. As packages move through the supply chain, radars
and sensors collect data. Big data tools then optimize the delivery routes to ensure that pack-
ages reach on time. Overall, UPS has saved 1.6 million gallons of gasoline in its trucks each
year, greatly lowering delivery costs (Parmar 2021).
Therefore, some of the studies have proven the positive impacts of using big data on
supply chain performance through case studies. In this regard, Nita (2015) by applying het-
erogeneous mixture learning to big data showed that systematization and accuracy increase
in demand forecasting can decrease the distribution costs and disposal losses in the food
supply chain. Papanagnou and Matthews-Amune (2018) through the use of the multivariate

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time series analysis technique (VARX) concluded that customer-generated content from
various internet sources such as Google, YouTube, and newspapers can improve demand
forecasting accuracy in the short term and response to demand volatility in retail pharmacy
settings. Zhong et al. (2015) proposed an RFID-enabled approach to extract logistics data.
Through case studies, they showed the feasibility and practicality of the proposed approach
which can reveal rich knowledge for further advanced decision-makings like logistics plan-
ning, production planning and scheduling, and enterprise-oriented strategies. Lee et al.
(2018) applied data mining and optimization methods to real-life cases from a liner shipping
company considering weather data to optimize vessel speed, fuel cost, and service level.
They demonstrated that this approach provides better fuel consumption estimates compared
to the benchmark method which ignores the weather impact.
To help managers make better use of the available big data and obtain competitive advan-
tages, a big data infrastructure is required. Managers require strategies to organise and com-
bine diverse streams of data to build a coherent picture of a given situation, rather than
simply generating enormous amounts of data using existing software (Tan et al. 2015). In
addition, scientific methodologies are now necessary for storing, analysing, and displaying
big data so that businesses may make benefit from the information assets that are available
to them (Grover and Kar 2017; Roy et al. 2018) highlights some aspects of data manage-
ment techniques that have been applied in SCM. For example, using Hadoop as a platform
to manage massive data has been mentioned in this survey. However, we assume that some
beneficial techniques can still manage and control big data aside from Hadoop.
As a result, big data management and big data optimisation are two essential pillars of
using big data in SCM. Big data management refers to the infrastructures and frameworks
to process and manage data as well as data storing tools and techniques. On the other hand,
big data optimisation addresses the methods, techniques, and tools that can be applied to big
data to make data-driven decisions leading to improvement in the performance of the supply
chain. Moreover, it determines how and in what extent, big data can help a supply chain take
advantage of the huge amount of its gathered data and transform it into valuable knowledge.
Understanding how big data can be optimised and managed will reduce firms’ operational
costs, given the improved track-and-trace capabilities and lower forecast errors, which help
avoid lost sales and increase companies’ profit.
Therefore, understanding how big data can be optimised and managed can help reduce
firms’ operational costs, given the improved track-and-trace capabilities and lower forecast
errors, which help avoid lost sales. In particular, the significant data optimisation foundation
is to find an alternative means to achieve higher performance considering the cost-effective
conditions. Also, optimisation means doing the best strategy related to a set of selected
constraints, which include significant factors such as reliability, productivity, efficiency,
longevity, strength, and utilization (Roy et al. 2018) introduced a survey that shows certain
optimisation technologies and the associated applications applicable in many organisations.
It highlights some aspects of data management techniques that have been applied in SCM.
For example, using Hadoop as a platform to manage massive data has been mentioned (Roy
et al. 2018). However, we assume that some beneficial techniques can still manage and
control big data aside from Hadoop.
Big data applications in SCM appear to be discussed and reported in the literature often;
however, this topic has different angles which are not well defined. There are some frag-
mentation and missing coverage in the literature due to some reasons: (1) the supply chain

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scope has a major evolution over the last two decades from being synonymous with logis-
tics (Cooper et al. 1997) to be a melting pot of primary and supporting activities, span-
ning everything from purchasing to operations management, logistics and transportation,
distribution and retail, relationship management, and information technology (Giunipero
et al. 2008); (2) different disciplines have handled SCM often, using various nomenclature,
preventing the development of a unified body of knowledge (Maestrini et al. 2017); and (3)
optimisation techniques and identifying the capabilities of big data technologies have rarely
been studied in their entirety, but rather in parts and pieces, such as comprehensive classify-
ing big data analytics in SCM in (Nguyen et al. 2018) or broadly discussing the technolo-
gies of managing the massive data (Gupta et al. 2019). The coverage of these topics often
considers only one portion of its value in the supply chain, without in-depth discussion on
the processes involved, the obstacles, and providing examples from the industry. Despite
this, the academic literature lacks a complete summary of the issue.
Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review that (1) investigates the tools
and techniques of optimising big data in SCM, (2) provides comprehensive coverage of the
applied big data management solutions in industries, and (3) summarises the potential solu-
tions that may address the research gaps. The current systematic literature review provides
an analysis of the literature contents, which is able to introduce a full picture of how big data
is optimised and managed in SCM. To achieve the goals, this systematic literature review
answers the following questions:

1) How to optimise big data in SCM?

2) What tools are most used to manage big data in SCM?

These two research questions have been addressed using the bibliometric analysis and con-
tent analysis methods. While the methodology reported in the review of (Nguyen et al.
2018), has provided robust steps to conduct the systematic review, they did not use biblio-
metric analysis that can assist in discovering the urgent and published areas of research.
Instead, they used descriptive analysis to use a set of analytical and structural groups of
a classification framework. (Gupta et al. 2019; Tiwari et al. 2018) also used descriptive
analysis and (Arunachalam et al. 2018) employed both bibliometric and thematic analysis
in their literature review. As mentioned by Govindan et al. (2018) and Mishra et al. (2018),
bibliometric analysis is to suggest the urgent clusters and encourage scholars to further
expand and collaborate the knowledge in the supply chain field. Thus, these limitations of
the adopted methodology in (Nguyen et al. 2018) yield us to introduce our modification on
it.
This paper aims to contribute to the development of big data in the supply chain, focusing
on two major aspects of big data: big data management and optimisation. Also, to present
what solutions, techniques, and tools have been utilised to optimise and manage big data
contributing to the research field in SCM. This paper combines the coverage of two appli-
cations of big data management and optimisation which may affect the way we approach
studying these technologies in SCM.
This paper contains three main sections apart from the introduction and the conclusion.
Section two incorporates related work, research methodology of the systematic literature
review, and bibliometric analysis of the literature. Section three presents findings and dis-

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cussion on materials evaluation. Then a brief discussion on the major gaps and the future
directions is presented in section four.

2 Research methodology

2.1 Related work

Based on our collections of articles related to big data applications in SCM, we created a
small database of related review articles to compare between their scopes, research meth-
odologies, and their coverage. Although there are several literature reviews of big data ana-
lytics in the area of SCM, the majority of them are based on SCM applications of big data
analytics (Addo-Tenkorang and Helo 2016; Anitha and Patil 2018; Arunachalam et al. 2018;
Barbosa et al. 2018; Brinch 2018; Chaudhuri et al. 2018; Chehbi-Gamoura et al. 2020;
Govindan et al. 2018; Gupta et al. 2019; Mishra et al. 2018; Nguyen et al. 2018; Tiwari et
al. 2018). Table 1 presents a summary of such studies, including the authors’ names, year
of publication, and the main focus and the limitations of their work. Past literature has
also been evaluated since it partially deals with big data applications in supply chain and
emphasises its contributions to researchers’ grasp of supply chain. Although the past litera-
ture provides the essential initial points of our study, there are some identified limitations
(in addition to the limitations shown in Table 1 for each study): (i) the methodology of the
review and its steps are not well illustrated; (ii) a minimal literature review on supply chain
performing cross-maps with big data optimisations techniques; and (iii) there is a lack of
defining, comparing, and presenting big data management tools in SCM.
Consequently, the scope of this systematic literature review focuses on both big data
management and optimisation studies in SCM in recent years that gives our work a novel
multidimensional structure unlike previous literature reviews that mostly focused on big
data analytics. We believe that this study will overcome these previous limitations by (i)
introducing a definition of big data optimisation, and how big data is optimised, what tech-
niques are used to optimise big data in supply chain and (ii) comparing the common tools of
managing big data, and its applications in the industrial context. We adopted a review meth-
odology and modified it by involving a reporting flowchart and content analysis method
to provide useful insights to increase the reliability of our study and allow its adoption.
Content analysis is also a systematic method that allows users to make correct inferences
from a vocal, graphical, or structured text to define and measure certain occurrences y sys-
tematically and objectively (Downe-Wamboldt 1992).

2.2 Research methodology

In order to achieve this study’s objectives, the paper used an adopted systematic review
methodology introduced by Nguyen et al. (2018). However, the methodology of Nguyen et
al. (2018) lacks reporting the literature in a comprehensive approach and utilising textual
analysis for the reported articles. Thus, the research methodology in this paper attempts to
address these limitations in three points which are:

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Table 1 Previous studies of literature reviews on big data applications in SCM

Author Main focus Limitations
(Addo-Ten- Investigating the literature of big data applications A lack of exploration on big data
korang and and techniques in supply chain optimisation and management
Helo 2016) techniques.
(Arunacha- There is a discussion of optimisation of supply The paper includes the bibliometric
lam et al. chain performance. and thematic analysis of the reviewed
2018) papers without a comprehensive
explanation
(Barbosa et The review is to learn what resources in supply A brief discussion on benefits of
al. 2018) chain can be managed by big data technology. optimisation solutions for increasing
the performance.
(Brinch 2018) This review aims to address the least defined A lack of exploration on big data
nature of big data in terms of its utility in supply optimisation and management
chain from a business process standpoint techniques.
(Chaudhuri et The paper identifies the different types of data that A lack of exploration on big data
al. 2018) can be utilised in the cold chain to process deci- optimisation and management
sion making in the logistics of a cold chain. techniques.
(Mishra et al. The paper presents a bibliometric analysis to There is a lack of discussion and con-
2018) evaluate the research trend and directions on big tent analysis on big data optimisation
data applications in supply chain. techniques and management.
(Anitha and The study examines how big data technologies The study lacks discussing and
Patil 2018) may be applied in the field of supply chain for reporting literature of these
storing data, analysis, management, understand- technologies.
ing, and visualisation.
(Govindan et The paper examines a number of ways of improv- There is a lack of discussion and con-
al. 2018) ing big data analytics and implementations in tent analysis on the big data optimi-
logistics management sation techniques and management.
(Tiwari et al. Between 2010 and 2016, the article explores big A brief discussion on benefits of
2018) data analytics research and implementation in sup- optimisation solutions for increasing
ply chain and delivers suggestions to companies. the performance.
(Nguyen et The paper presents a new classification scheme There is a lack of discussion and con-
al. 2018) that offers a complete overview of the present tent analysis on the big data optimi-
literature on how and where big data analytics is sation techniques and management.
used in SCM.
(Gupta et al. The paper presents a systematic literature review There is a lack of discussion and con-
2019) on the applications of big data in the humanitarian tent analysis on the big data optimi-
supply chain. sation techniques and management.
The paper also uses one database to
collect the literature papers.
(Chehbi- The study assesses how various methods of big There is a lack of discussion and con-
Gamoura et data analytics can be utilised in supply chain. tent analysis on the big data optimi-
al. 2020) sation techniques and management.

1 The research methodology involves only three main stages: collecting materials, biblio-
metric analysis, and categorising the documents.
2 The materials were assessed and evaluated during the collecting materials stage because
we involved a reporting flowchart (PRISMA). The reporting flowchart is to enhance the
quality of the tractability and reporting of the system (Moher et al. 2009). The report-
ing flowchart is preferred during the literature search process to record the included
and excluded studies (Yang et al. 2017). The significance of PRISMA flow diagram
lies in assessing the logical stages of the literature reporting process as well as defin-
ing the process boundaries (Vu-Ngoc et al. 2018). PRISMA is a 27-item checklist that

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covers the abstract, introduction, methodology, findings, and discussion of the paper to
improve transparency in systematic reviews (Page et al. 2021). The reporting flowchart
helps assess the materials and evaluate their inclusion or exclusion before analysing
them, which has not been done in the methodology of (Nguyen et al. 2018).
3 Involving a bibliometric analysis of the collected documents to provide insights and
meaningful information about these documents. The Bibliometrix R-package was
chosen because it offers a variety of metrics for keyword analysis, author scientific
publications, country-author collaborations, and a conceptual structure (Aria and Cuc-
curullo 2017). Bibliometrix R-package supports analysing the extracted materials from
the three databases which are Scopus and Web of Science databases. Therefore, other
applications of bibliometric analysis lack the combination between all three databases
to perform such a comprehensive analysis.

2.2.1 Collecting materials

In this step, a process of searching and collecting materials relevant to the topic is involved.
For building a database for the records obtained from the searching process, the PRISMA
flowchart (Moher et al. 2009) is adopted to eliminate the observed results of documents
based on certain criteria to build a database for the records obtained from the searching
process. Notably, three main databases were used to collect research papers relevant to the
scope of this literature. These databases are Scopus, ProQuest, and Web of Science, which
are deemed as comprehensive and most powerful databases (Yang et al. 2017). Then, a
distinguished set of keywords is identified in (Table 2) to synthesise the literature. Conse-
quently, the keywords were grouped into two groups (A and B).
Group (A) contains keywords are to seek relevant records of big data and Group (B)
consists of keywords are to find results pertinent to SCM. Most importantly, some of the
keywords involve a wildcard (*) character to provide comprehensive results and include
as many records as possible and avoid missing any relevant effect. Keywords from both
groups (A) and (B) are joint using operator “AND” in the research, and operator “OR” used
within the same group. Table 3 shows the three different strings that combine keywords
from Table 2.
The search string differs from a database to another one because it is often difficult to
reproduce the exact same query between databases. For example, some databases offer only
searching in titles and abstracts but excluding the keywords such as ProQuest which may
result in less detail of reporting the literature. However, full-text mining might be a useful
option (Penning de Vries et al. 2020). There are at least two (not necessarily unique) meth-
ods of leveraging data and text mining to choose articles for additional review, as mentioned
by (O’Mara-Eves et al. 2015) as cited in (Penning de Vries et al. 2020). The technique
of extracting knowledge and structure from unstructured material is known as text min-

Table 2 Keywords used in col- Group (A) Group (B)

lecting materials
“Big Data” “Supply Chain”
“Data Optimisation” “Supply Operations”
“Data management”
“Data Warehous*” (Warehouse/Warehouses)
“Data Analy*” (Analytics/Analysis/Analyzing)

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Table 3 Search strings in the Database Search String

databases
Scopus ((TITLE-ABS-KEY (“big data”) OR TITLE-
ABS-KEY (“data optimization”) OR TITLE- ABS-
KEY (“data management”) OR TITLE- ABS-KEY
(“data warehous*”) OR TITLE-ABS- KEY (“data
analy*”))) AND ((TITLE-ABS-
KEY (“supply chain*”) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY
(“supply operations”)))
*ProQuest ti(((“Big Data”) OR (“Data Optimization”) OR
(“Data management”) OR (“Data Warehous*”) OR
(“Data Analy*”)) AND ((“Supply Chain*”) OR
(“Supply Operations”))) OR ab(((“Big Data”) OR
(“Data Optimization”) OR (“Data management”)
OR (“Data Warehous*”) OR (“Data Analy*”)) AND
((“Supply Chain*”) OR (“Supply Operations”)))
Web of ((TI=(“big data”) OR TI=(“data optimization”)
Science OR TI=(“data management”) OR TI=(”data
warehous*”) OR TI=(“data analy*”))) AND
((TI=(“supply chain*”) OR TI=(“supply opera-
tions”))) OR ((AB=(“big data”) OR AB=(“data
optimization”) OR AB=(“data management”) OR
AB=(“data warehous*”) OR AB=(“data analy*”)))
AND ((AB=(“supply chain*”) OR AB=(“supply op-
erations”))) OR ((AK=(“big data”) OR AK=(“data
* ProQuest database does not optimization”) OR AK=(“data management”) OR
provide keywords field. Hence, AK=(“data warehous*”) OR AK=(“data analy*”)))
we only used the titles and the AND ((AK=(“supply chain*”) OR AK=(“supply
abstract searching fields. operations”)))

ing (Hearst 1999). Though not yet firmly proven, text mining’s potential for automatically
eliminating studies should be viewed as encouraging. It can be utilised with a high degree
of confidence in highly technical and clinical domains, but additional research is needed in
other fields for development and evaluation.
Another alternative is searching using subject headings which refers to regulated vocabu-
lary terms, to identify the subject matter of an article (Guidance for students and staff:
literature searching n.d.). Utilizing relevant subject headings may improve the search and
enable one to locate additional details on the selected topic (Guidance for students and staff:
literature searching n.d.).
The search is done based on all likely pairs between the two categories of keywords con-
sidering the four stages of PRISMA flowchart diagram as shown in Fig. 1.

Identification stage the first results by combining Group A and Group B keywords were
2963 from Scopus and 6842 documents from ProQuest and Web of Science databases, with-
out any searching filters. After deleting the duplicates, 8090 documents were found.

Screening stage using the document type filter in each database, we selected only peer-
reviewed papers, final documents and, English writing published in the last ten years. The
choice of the last ten years is because big data applications, especially big data analytics,
became a phenomenon globally since 2011 (Nguyen et al. 2018). Thus, the excluded results
were 6203, and 1887 documents were included screened. The results are only shown in the
period of the last ten years. The purpose of this stage is to screen the documents to check
their eligibility in the next stage.

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Fig. 1 PRISMA flowchart for reporting the results of searching documents of the literature

Eligibility stage in this stage, we chose only Computer Science, Administration, and Busi-
ness subject areas for each document. This is to ensure the relevance of the documents to
our scope. During this stage, there were 1773 excluded articles in different subjects’ areas
that are not relevant to our topic and the research questions. Another exclusion reason is that
documents from 2010 to 2014 did not clearly describe the application of big data optimisa-
tion and management in supply chain. Hence, only 114 records were included since they are
in the same domain, Computer Science and Business, and in the period from 2015 to 20th
of June 2021.

Inclusion stage After the eligibility stage, we assessed each article of the 114 articles by
reading the title, the abstract, the keywords, the objectives of the paper, and the conclusion.
We found 77 papers that are irrelevant which we could not find our answers to the research
questions. Thus, these 77 papers were removed, and only 37 peer-reviewed documents were
included in our database. We then stored the relevant information to prepare it for biblio-
metric analysis.

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2.2.2 Bibliometric analysis of the literature

This section presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis to discover more about the pre-
vious studies associated with the relationship between big data optimisation and manage-
ment in SCM. The bibliometric analysis was done using a bibliometric package embedded
in the R language. The bibliometric package supports the process of importing data from
different databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed and assists researchers in
building data metrics (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017). Before applying the analysis, the data file
was processed to ensure that the necessary attributes are available. Some useful metrics can
be found from the analysis and are presented in Figs. 2, 3, 4 and 5, and 6.

2.2.2.1 Insights of journals portfolios. To understand the role of several journals found in
the literature, we created a table of top ten journals that published articles in the field of big
data and supply chain, but mainly related to our research focus which is optimization and
management of big data. Table 4 shows the number of articles1 in each journal indicating
the highest and lowest number of publications. All the journals are sorted by counting the
number of publications. Interestingly, there is a lack of publications on our focus of big data
optimization and big data management from year 2010 to 2013. However, from 2014, there
has been an increase of publications, whereas the peak of publications was in 2018. Journals
insights are helpful for whom interested publish in the future as it offers an overview of
metrics of the research.

2.2.2.2 The number of annually published articles. With a total of 37 papers published on
this topic, Fig. 2 shows the annual number of articles published from 2015 to 2020 on big
data applications in SCM. Noticeably, in 2018, the number of records increased dramati-
cally to 12 documents.

2.2.2.3 The most common keywords. Figure 3 (Words Cloud) shows the frequency of key-
words used in the literature. For example, “big data,” “decision-making,” “manufacture,”
“supply chains,” “big data applications,” “information management,” “data handling,” “data
acquisition,” and “digital storage” are the hot spots of the research, which shows a high fre-
quency mentioned in many studies. Interestingly, other keywords also have a remarkable
frequency of appearance in the literature, which also could be helpful to answer the research
questions such as “cloud computing,” “internet of things,” “artificial intelligence,” “data
analytics,” and “industry 4.0”.

Figure 3 highlights the most common keywords discussed and studied by scholars in
big data applications in SCM. The keywords “optimisation” and “big data management”
have not been involved highly being focused on. The benefit of the words cloud is to show
how many times a number of keywords have been involved in the research field. If there is
a slight appearance of these keywords, this indicates a lack of literature on relevant topics.

1
There are articles that have no insights from their journals. Thus, only 26 articles found and reported their
journal insights.

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 Table 4 Journals publications breakdown
Source 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 Total
Computers and Industrial Engineering 4 1 5
Annals of Operations Research 2 1 1 4
Computers and Operations Research 3 3
IEEE Access 1 1 1 3
International Journal of Information Engineering and Electronic Business 2 3
International Journal of Logistics Management 2 3
International Journal of Production Economics 1 1 1 3
Transportation Research Part E-Logistics and Transportation Review 2 2
Production Planning and Control 1 1
Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a…

Journal of Business Logistics 1 1

Total 2 5 1 13 2 2 1
S263

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Fig. 2 Annual number of published articles from 2015 to 2020

2.2.2.4 Conceptual structure map and co-occurrence network. The co-word analysis aims
to represent the conceptual structure of a framework by relying on the co-occurrence. There
are three various useful mapping types of the conceptual structure that can be generated from
the conceptual structure-function. These are a conceptual structure map, factorial map of the
highest cited documents, and a factorial map for the most contributed papers. This paper
visualised a conceptual structure map (Fig. 4), which shows two clusters of the authors’
keywords. Authors’ keywords mean the keywords that have been noted by authors in their
articles (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017). The two clusters are obtained by using the Multidimen-
sional Scaling method (MDS). The two clusters are obtained by using the Multidimensional
Scaling method (MDS). Both clusters indicate that the classified keywords are the most in

Fig. 3 Words Cloud of the frequency of keywords

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Fig. 4 Conceptual Structure Map using Multidimensional Scaling method (MDS)

the attention of big data and supply chain researchers. Both dimensions correspond to the

Fig. 5 Co-occurrence Network

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most used keywords in SCM and represent those keywords from the big data analysis field.

The Keywords Co-occurrence Network (KCN) aims to focus on extracting the knowl-
edge components from any scientific research through testing the links between the key-
words found in the literature (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017). Figure 5 shows two clusters of the
most occurrence keywords grouped in two different colours (red and blue), indicating these
keywords’ frequent appearance between different types of studies.

2.2.2.5 Three-fields plot. Figure 6 shows the visualisation of three main fields of the biog-
raphy and the relationship between them using a Sankey diagram (Aria and Cuccurullo
2017). The left-field represents the keywords; the middle field shows authors, and the right
field is for the most frequent words in the titles. Commonly, the “big data” keyword has
been in the direction of several researchers. Meanwhile, “data,” “big,” “supply,” “analyt-
ics,” and “chain” are more used in the title of the papers. Figure 6 also helps identify the
researchers’ focus on different aspects of SCM and applying big data analytics.

Although Bibliometrix R-tool provided rich analysis for this study, there are other useful
visualisation tools including Bibexcel, Gephi, Pajek, and VOSviewer (Donthu et al. 2021).
As a result, relevant outcomes could be produced to offer solutions to certain study con-
cerns. In addition, other bibliometric analysis methods, like citation analysis, could be used.
A co-citation network is formed when two publications are connected when they are listed
as references in another article. Co-citation analysis enables researchers to locate the most
significant publications as well as learn about theme clusters (Donthu et al. 2021). Through
the incorporation of additional categories of searched documents including business peri-
odicals, case studies, and newspaper articles, a detailed assessment can be conducted in the
near future by utilising more databases to obtain more data insights on the search themes

Fig. 6 Three-field plot link between authors, titles, and keywords in the literature

13
Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a… S267

(Alsolbi et al. 2022). In terms of the subject’s scope of study and scalability, expanding the
types of papers and sources can be more beneficial.

2.2.3 Categories selection

The category selection step aims at using analytical categories and structural dimensions to
conceptualise the classification framework (Nguyen et al. 2018). In this paper, two struc-
tural dimensions have been selected to create different layers of the framework: big data
management and big data optimisation. For the dimension of big data management, two
categories of data architecture and storing data techniques are considered. Based on the
approach of papers, the dimension of big data optimisation is divided into two categories of
big data impacts on supply chain performance and optimisation techniques and applications,
as shown in Table 5.
In terms of supply chain functions, five main functions are procurement, manufactur-
ing and production, logistics and transportation, warehousing, and demand management, as
used in the review of (Nguyen et al. 2018). We also considered the general SCM for papers
having a general perspective. The outcomes of the categorisation are shown in Table 4.
Interestingly, most of these papers addressed big data optimisation and a small number of
them dealt with both structural dimensions (Roy et al. 2018; Tan et al. 2015; Vieira et al.

Table 5 Papers categorisation based on big data dimensions and supply chain functions
Dimension Category Supply Chain Functions
General SCM Manufac- Logistics and Demand
turing and Transportation management
Production
Big data Data (Biswas and Sen 2016; (Sarabia-
management architecture Zhan and Tan 2020) Jacome et al.
2020)
Storing data (Grover and Kar 2017) (Kim 2017)
techniques
Big data Big data (Asrini et al. 2020; Bag (Shafique et (Hofmann
optimisation impacts on 2017; Chen et al. 2015; al. 2019) 2017)
supply chain Dubey et al. 2018; Fer-
performance nando et al. 2018; Gunas-
ekaran et al. 2017; Irfan
and Wang 2019; Mubarik
et al. 2019)
Optimisation (Doolun et al. 2018; (Ji et al. (Lee et al. (Boone et
techniques and Lamba and Singh 2017, 2017) 2018; Zhong al. 2019;
applications 2018; Navickas and Gru- et al. 2015) Hofmann
zauskas 2016; Rai 2019; and
Wang et al. 2016; Zhao et Rutschmann
al. 2017) 2018; Nita
2015;
Papanag-
nou and
Matthews-
Amune
2018)
Both Storing data/ (Roy et al. 2018; Tan et (Vieira et
dimensions Optimisations al. 2015) al. 2020;
techniques Zhong et
al. 2016)

13
S268 I. Alsolbi et al.

2020; Zhong et al. 2016). Interestingly, most of these papers addressed big data optimisa-
tion, and a small number of them dealt with both structural dimensions.

3 Findings and discussion

Several studies on big data applications involve the processes of collecting, processing,
analysing, and visualising beneficial information through technical means associated with
machine learning. Some useful articles and reviews introduced different searching models,
classification frameworks, empirical studies, surveys, and literature reviews. Both studies
(Grover and Kar 2017; Nguyen et al. 2018) encouraged us to study more about big data
applications in the supply chain domain.
However, conducting big data studies can be challenging as technology is evolving rap-
idly. With regards to supply chain functions, which are procurement, manufacturing, ware-
housing, logistics and transportation, and demand management (Nguyen et al. 2018), there
are only a few studies that sought to tackle the optimisation approaches such as routing and
order-picking challenges in warehousing by the use of big data. Such problems have been
frequently addressed using mathematical modelling, simulation, and heuristic and meta-
heuristic solution algorithms (Ardjmand et al. 2020; Cano et al. 2020; Schubert et al. 2020;
(Shavaki and Jolai 2021a, b). The review indicated that there is little known of real-time
optimisation models to enhance the effectiveness of the production and logistics process
(Nguyen et al. 2018). There is a shortage of studies on how big data can be managed in
the supply chain. There are conceptual models of data infrastructure, big data management
solutions, and proposed approaches to tackle the huge amount of big data.
To better answer the research questions in this paper, we reviewed and analysed each
paper’s main work, the contribution to the research field, and synthesised it with other simi-
lar articles.

3.1 How to optimise big data in SCM?

The usage of big data in SCM allows businesses to gain a variety of short-term advantages
in their operations (Chen et al. 2015). For instance, analysing point of sale data can help
with pricing and special services for each customer group, while analysing inventory and
shipping data can minimise lead times and increase product availability, and consequently
increase sales amount (Chen et al. 2015), the optimisation of quality-product trade-off can
help in producing high-quality products with lower costs (Mubarik et al. 2019). Moreover,
the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can help small markets in improving the
decision-making process in logistics functions (Navickas and Gruzauskas 2016). Behav-
ioural analytics and fraud detection solutions are the other applications of big data in SCM
(Patil 2017).
The research question sought to investigate how big data in the supply chain can be opti-
mised. To answer this question, we firstly review previous studies on the effects of big data
usage on supply chain performance to clarify big data’s potential to improve and facilitate
SCM, and then we will elaborate on big data optimisation in SCM. Several scholars have
empirically investigated the impacts of using big data on the performance of supply chain
by using statistical methods in a generic supply chain (Chen et al. 2015; Gunasekaran et

13
Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a… S269

al. 2017; Hofmann and Rutschmann 2018). Also, researchers have studied the effects of
applying big data in a specific industry, such as food and beverage supply chains (Irfan and
Wang 2019), pharmaceutical industry (Asrini et al. 2020; Shafique et al. 2019), oil and gas
industry (Mubarik et al. 2019), services and humanitarian supply chains (Dubey et al. 2018;
Fernando et al. 2018), and mining and minerals industry (Bag 2017).
Chen et al. (2015) investigated the influence of big data analytics (BDA) usage on organ-
isational performance considering both the antecedents and consequences of the BDA usage
through a TOE (technology organisation environment) framework. Their findings showed
that BDA has a positive impact on both asset productivity and business growth.
Irfan and Wang (2019) looked at how data-driven capabilities affected supply chain inte-
gration and firm competitiveness in Pakistan’s food and beverage industry. They adopted
the structural equation modelling approach to test their hypotheses on collected survey data.
Asrini et al. (2020) investigated the effects of supply chain integration, learning, big data
analytics capabilities, and supply chain agility on the firm’s performance by the use of struc-
tural equation modelling approach in the pharmaceutical companies in Indonesia. (Mubarik
et al. 2019) explored the influence of big data supply chain analytics and supply chain
integration on supply chain efficiency across the board, including forecasting and supplier
management, sourcing, production, inventory management, and transportation. To measure
the relationships, they used covariance-based structural equation modelling.
Fernando et al. (2018) also used structural equation modelling to investigate the effects
of big data analytics on data protection, innovation capacity, and supply chain efficiency.
Dubey et al. (2018) used the ordinary least square regression to test the impact of big data
and predictive analytics on visibility and coordination in humanitarian supply chains.
Shafique et al. (2019) used partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM)
to investigate the relationship between big data predictive analytics acceptance and supply
chain success in the pharmaceutical logistics industry in China. They also used the” vari-
ance accounted for” form of mediation to assess the role of RFID technology in mediation.
Bag (2017) employed partial least square regression analysis to examine the correla-
tion between buyer-supplier relationships, big data and prescriptive analytics, and supply
chain performance in managing supply ambiguities in companies of mining and minerals
manufacturing in South Africa. Hofmann (2017) focused on how big data could be used
to optimise supply chain processes by reducing the bullwhip effect. He used an existing
system dynamics model to simulate the effects of big data levers such as velocity, length,
and variety on the bullwhip effect in a two-stage supply chain, taking into account several
starting points derived from previous research. The results revealed that the lever velocity
has a great potential to enhance the performance in the supply chain.
In addition to the studies mentioned above that demonstrate the positive impact of big
data on supply chain performance, the systematic literature review proved that big data opti-
misation is widely applied in all functional areas within SCM. In demand management, Nita
(2015) systematised demand forecasting using heterogeneous mixture learning technology
in the food supply chain. Hofmann and Rutschmann (2018) studied the impacts of big data
analytics on demand forecasting accuracy. Papanagnou and Matthews-Amune (2018) pro-
posed using the VARX model to evaluate the impact of independent variables obtained
from various internet-based sources on inhibitory sales trends data to improve forecasting
accuracy. Boone et al. (2019) provided an overview of how customer insights focused on
big data and related technologies could improve supply chain sales forecasting.

13
S270 I. Alsolbi et al.

In logistics and transportation, companies prefer optimisation as a suitable approach

since it strengthens predictive analytics (Nguyen et al. 2018). In this regard, a holistic Big
Data approach was proposed by Zhong et al. (2015) to mine massive RFID-enabled shop
floor logistics data for the frequent trajectory to quantitatively evaluate logistics operations
and machines. Another experimental study to obtain a decision support optimisation in
logistics has been introduced by the authors of Lee et al. (2018). They relied on weather
historical big data to decide the optimal speed that reduces the fuel consumption while ves-
sels are serving. They proposed a novel approach to parse weather data and use data mining
techniques to learn about the influence of the weather on fuel consumption. The results of
their experiment showed that better fuel consumption obtained forecasts from fuel con-
sumption function. Also, suggested routes are introduced in the study to provide enhanced
decisions. These studies contributed to adding examples of how big data can be optimised,
relying on logistics issues.
In manufacturing and production, there is a growing interest among scholars to inves-
tigate the real-time optimisation models to enhance the effectiveness of the production
processes. Simulation and modelling are increasingly being adopted in the development
of real-time manufacturing control systems whereby tracking devices like RFID and sen-
sors provide a sufficient and consistent flow of instantaneous data (Zhong et al. 2015). In
their study, Ji et al. (2017) used a Bayesian network to create a cause-and-effect relation-
ship between the data to forecast direct food production and market demand accurately. As
another big data application, IoT is involved in SCM because it helps in improving opera-
tional efficiencies and creating opportunities for cutting costs in the sourcing, procurement,
production, and distribution processes (Aryal et al. 2018; Kim 2017). Adopting IoT in SCM
is already applied in many companies such as United Parcel Service (UPS), which reduced
the idling time and costs of services (Aryal et al. 2018). The installation of sensors in prod-
ucts can help a company to trace the movement of all the goods from the warehouse to the
customer through interconnected devices. Effective inventory management is enhanced by
IoT as embedded technology on items communicates and gives alerts on lead times, stock-
outs, and product availability (Aryal et al. 2018; Barbosa et al. 2018).
The systems and equipment in the network can respond by initiating another manufactur-
ing process or triggering procurement requests to the raw material’ suppliers in case of low
stock. Furthermore, there are still few studies on improving order-picking processes such as
sorting, routing, and batching by using big data optimisation.
In terms of big data models, it is evident from the trend assessment that prescriptive
analytics appears in more frequently published literature in the management of big data
analytics-driven SCM compared to predictive and descriptive analytics. One of the rea-
sons is that predictive analytics has become mainstream in most areas, and domain-related
scholarly publications are limited. That does not mean that predictive analytics is out. Seye-
dan and Mafakheri (2020) provide an overview of predictive BDA for the supply chain,
including customer analysis, demand prediction, and trend analysis. Demand forecasting in
closed-loop supply chains is regarded as one area in demand in both research and practice.
Likewise, the application of IoT devices in conjunction with AI and analytical approaches
also has significant potential.
Regarding predictive analytics, time series, deep learning, machine learning (e.g., sup-
port vector machines), models for demand forecasting and classification are some of the

13
Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a… S271

predominant approaches being applied in production to improve planning and control and
equipment maintenance in the manufacturing process.
Furthermore, classification is a critical big data analytics model that helps in improv-
ing procurement research and logistics. Critically, the association is a popular model used
in descriptive analytics, and it is usually applied across the diverse functional areas in the
supply chain from procurement, warehousing, logistics, to demand management. Similarly,
in most of the studies reported in the literature of (Nguyen et al. 2018), the visualisation
model is treated less significantly mostly as a supplement of other state-of-the-art data min-
ing models. The literature review of Govindan et al. (2018) presented opportunities of how
big data can be collected from different sources, such as ERP systems, logistics and orders,
newsfeeds, manufacturing environment, surveillance videos, radio frequency-based identi-
fication tracking, customers behaviours patterns, and product lifecycle operations. Dealing
with the massive datasets leads researchers to consider techniques of optimising big data
(Govindan et al. 2018). The findings of this study show that optimising big data in SCM has
many benefits, including cost reduction. Noticeably, this paper stated comprehensively what
chances and places where optimisation can occur; however, there is still a gap in covering
how big data can be optimised with the introduced technologies in this paper.
Hofmann and Rutschmann (2018) presented a table of advanced applications of analyt-
ics to enhance the predictions in supply chain retail through some optimisation tools. These
optimisation tools, such as a price optimisation tool, optimise forecasting of amounts of
cashiers relying on the number of visitors of a store. Doolun et al. (2018) presented one
other interesting study of optimisation in the supply chain, which applies a data-driven
hybrid analytical approach to overcome a supply chain location-allocation problem with
four echelons. The main problem they focused on is to find the locations of warehouses and
plants that should be operating with minimum costs of supply, considering the requirement
of maximising the customer demands. A data-driven analytical hybrid NSDEA algorithm
was involved in this experiment to select the best control variables. Therefore, they chose
five variant of hybrid algorithms that were validated to locate the number of warehouses and
plants among different sites. The study concludes that NSDEA is one of the powerful tools
that can be considered to determine the solutions of that case of the Malaysian electronic
auto parts supply chain.
Lamba and Singh (2018) used three separate multi-criteria decision- making (MCDM)
techniques to inve(Lamba and Singh 2018)stigate the relationships between big data
enablers in operations and SCM, including interpretive structural modelling, fuzzy com-
plete interpretive structural modelling, and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory.
Liu and Yi (2018) examined the issues surrounding big data information (BDI) invest-
ment decision-making and its implications for supply chain coordination. They looked at a
supply chain with a producer and a retailer, with the manufacturer as the leader of the Stack-
elberg Game, determining the wholesale price, and the retailer as the follower, deciding
the order quantity. Based on the Stackelberg Game philosophy and teamwork theory, four
BDI investment modes and a coordination tactic have been proposed to evaluate the value
of the supply chain after investing in BDI in each investment mode. This paper provides
theoretical guidance for supply chain managers about BDI investment decisions and their
consequences.
An optimisation experiment done by Zhao et al. (2017) presents a multi-objective model
for managing a green supply chain scheme to minimise the risks as a result of hazardous

13
S272 I. Alsolbi et al.

materials, carbon emission, and economic costs. Big data analytics were used to capitalise
on the model parameters. In the model, they had adopted three scenarios (aimed to reduce
the hazardous materials, carbon, and economic costs) to improve the process of the green
supply chain. Results show that reducing carbon risks and emissions can be determined
through optimisation. Although this study is relevant to our questions, the authors did not
mention in detail what was done to optimise big data in this study. The big data term men-
tioned in the paper was to extract the parameters-related data. Involving big data analytics
in supply chain optimisation is a standard experiment however, steps of how big data was
analysed to lead to an optimised approach is crucial to add to the literature and provide an
adequate answer.
As a summary of the findings this section, Table 6 displays a list of applied research
methods and tools in the reviewed papers to optimise big data in the SCM field. From this
table, optimisation methods have been used more than the other techniques in this area.
While this paper is about big data optimisation, and management in SCM, the review
would not be complete without some pertinent comments about other frameworks that
have approached SCM. One such framework is using system models. System modelling
approaches such as system dynamics (Feng 2012; Rabelo et al. 2011), agent-based model-

Table 6 Methods and tools ap- Authors Methods Tools

plied in the reviewed papers for
Tan et al. (2015) Optimisation (Deduction LINGO software
big data optimisation
graph)
Nita (2015) Heterogeneous Mixture The learning sys-
Learning tem is provided by
NEC group via the
cloud environment
Hofmann and Five forecasting methods Several analytics
Rutschmann including grassroots, market software has been
(2018) research, expert estima- mentioned such as
tions, time-series, and causal SAS Contextual
models Analytics for data
exploration, IBM
SPSS Modeler for
advanced analytics,
and Apache Spark
and Storm for
stream analytics
Papanagnou Multivariate time series Not mentioned
and Matthews- analysis technique (VARX)
Amune (2018)
Doolun et al. Optimisation (mathematical MATLAB software
(2018) programming)
Lamba and Three multi-criteria Not mentioned
Singh (2018) decision-making (MCDM)
methods
(Zhong et al. Optimisation (mathematical C + + and MAT-
2015) programming) LAB software
Lee et al. (2018) Optimisation (mathematical MATLAB software
programming)
Ji et al. (2017) Optimisation (Bayesian net- Not mentioned
work and deduction graph)
Zhao et al. Optimisation (mathematical LINGO software
(2017) programming)

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Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a… S273

ling (Arvitrida 2018; Behdani et al. 2013), and network modelling are frequently employed
in supply chain modelling, analysis, and optimisation. These techniques have been applied
to small data. When it comes to big data, these techniques could still prove to be useful in
helping define conceptual models, thereby enabling better model building with big data.
Although previous studies addressed big data optimisation in various problems either within
a general supply chain or in a specific function and demonstrated the capabilities of big data
to improve supply chain performance, there are still gaps in the literature that need to be
dealt with. We discussed these gaps in Sect. 4.

3.2 What tools are most used to manage big data in SCM?

As the second research question, the literature review sought to summarise big data man-
agement tools and technologies among supply chain organisations. Table 7 shows the main
work and ideas of reviewed papers in big data management. It is evident that big data man-
agement conceptual models, and infrastructures of storage of vast amounts of data remain
challenging for many organisations.
With the development of industry 4.0 in the business world, every object linked with a
supply chain is continuously generating data in structured (data generated with the formal
structure like records, files, docs, and tables), semi-structured (data contains distinct seman-
tic elements but does not have formal nature), or unstructured (data without any identifiable
formal structure such as blogs, audio, video, image, etc.) forms Biswas and Sen (2016). Big
data experts believe that, in the next coming years, unstructured data will be the major pro-
portion of the total generated data (Zhan and Tan 2020). For example, data collected from
a variety of sources, such as sensors and digital cameras, in the service and manufactur-
ing industries are usually unstructured, heterogeneous, incompatible, and non-standardised
(Zhong et al. 2016). To cope with these difficulties, companies must pre-process the unstruc-
tured data and develop a shared data warehouse to store relatively homogeneous informa-
tion (Lamba and Singh 2017). The availability of a large amount of data gathered from
various sources has increased the risk of privacy and security of data (Fernando et al. 2018).
However, big data analysis platforms and tools have enabled managers to examine large
data sets in all forms to discover useful information such as hidden patterns and market
trends, helping organisations improve business decision-making (Grover and Kar 2017).
For instance, Papanagnou and Matthews-Amune (2018) investigated the use of structured
data from sales in conjunction with non-structured data from customers to enhance inven-
tory management. Biswas and Sen (2016), in their Big Data architecture, addressed both
structured and unstructured data so that the structured data was derived by extract transform
and load (ETL) mechanisms and is populated into a data warehouse. The unstructured data
was managed by the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and MapReduce systems
of the Hadoop cluster and is also stored in the NoSQL database. Tan et al. (2015) (which
presented analytics infrastructure framework) tried to harvest available unstructured data
of company SPEC (a leading eyeglasses manufacturer in China) to create ideas for new
products’ innovation and operations improvement. This company uses Apache Mahout for
machine learning algorithms, Tableau for big data visualisation, Storm for analysing real-
time computation systems, and InfoSphere for big data mining and integration. Zhan and
Tan (2020) analysed the unstructured data generated from multiple sources of LLY Com-
pany (a leading Chinese athletics products – shoes and sporting equipment – manufacturer

13
S274 I. Alsolbi et al.

Table 7 Main work and ideas of Dimension Category

papers in big data management
Big data Data architecture • Proposing an analytics
management infrastructure framework using
deduction graph techniques
to assist managers for better
decision-making processes, con-
sisting of two main steps which
are data management, and data
analytics (Tan et al. 2015).
• Proposing a big data-centric
architecture that takes advantage
of the existing state of the
data management system and
exploring big data protection
and privacy criteria (Biswas and
Sen 2016).
• Proposing an integrated data
architecture model to securely
share the data of Seaport Data
Space and promote an intelligent
transport multi-modal terminal
(Sarabia-Jacome et al. 2020).
• Synthesising existing literature
on big data analytics and
recommending an integrated
infrastructure to break down
information silos and improve
supply chain efficiency (Zhan
and Tan 2020).
Storing data • Examining and addressing
techniques major issues, prospects, and po-
tential perspectives in areas such
as data collection processes,
data delivery, data management,
processing technology, big
data enabled decision-making
models, and big data analysis
and implementation for supply
chain in service and manufactur-
ing (Zhong et al. 2016).
• Highlighting the importance,
features, and capability of Ha-
doop as an open source to offer
effective low costing solutions
of big data management in SCM
(Kim 2017).
• Big data tools and innova-
tions, such as big data analysis
systems, databases and data
warehouses, search tools, pro-
gramming languages, transfer
tools, and data aggregation,
are explored in their evolution,
styles, and implementations
(Grover and Kar 2017).

13
Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a… S275

on a global scale). This company uses the main technologies of big data such as Hadoop,
HBase, and Spark SQL.
It is stated by Tan et al. (2015) that the existing software remains challenging for manag-
ing a massive amount of data. Data varies in its types and resources, leading to difficulty
generalising the analytics tools and management systems. Despite the overwhelming task of
collecting and assessing the voluminous data, top management must prioritise the use of big
data analytics to enhance SCM. There are big data management tools that can be applied to
supply chain analytical operations, such as Hadoop, which is an open-source platform for
performing analyses on stored data (Grover and Kar 2017). Since there are many challenges
in storing big data, using Apache Storm is beneficial in supply chain networks. Apache
Storm is an open-source framework that provides a streaming process linked to clustering
data (Grover and Kar 2017).
Despite the various big data management technologies, organisations of the supply
chain, which aim to apply technologies of big data management, may face critical issues
when selecting a suitable platform. Table 8 shows the most reported big data management
tools that have been most cited in the literature.

Table 8 The most used technolo- Tool Functionality Type Data life
gies of big data management in cycle
SCM phases
Apache A method used to process An open- From
Hadoop largescale data apply- source data gen-
ing Java on distributed software eration to
computing. It is a mostly platform data de-
applied tool to store, struction
manage, and access data (Vavila-
among several computers palli et
(Addo-Tenkorang and al. 2013)
Helo 2016; Anitha and
Patil 2018).
GridGain By the use of this technol- An open- From
ogy, all queries in the source data use
database can be sent at in- middleware to data
memory speeds on a plat- solution destruc-
form that uses in-memory tion (Pop
computing (Grover and et al.
Kar 2017). 2012)
MapReduce A platform that is applied A program- From
for the distributed algo- ming model data gen-
rithms and parallel pro- eration to
cessing of massive data. data use
It is also a key module of (Dean
Hadoop (Grover and Kar and Ghe-
2017; Zhong et al. 2016). mawat
2008)
Apache It is used for distributed An open- From
Cassandra systems to tolerate the source data gen-
massive amount of data database eration to
and activity in real time manage- data de-
(Addo-Tenkorang and ment system struction
Helo 2016). (Cas-
sandra
2014)

13
S276 I. Alsolbi et al.

Another important concern of the managers is the potential of these platforms to be used
in different data life cycle phases from generation to destruction. (Chen and Zhao 2012)
divided data life cycle into seven stages including data generation, transfer, use, share,
storage, archival and destruction. Table 6 also displays each platform can be used in what
stages. Interestingly, it was noted by Tan et al. (2015) that analytics infrastructure is required
to structure and relate different bunches of information to the objectives.
Tan et al. (2015) summarised the analytic techniques into four main categories: Bur-
bidge’s connectome Concept, Influence diagram, Cognitive Mapping and Induction Graph.
They also described each of these techniques, their strengths, their weaknesses, and use-
ful software. Finally, they proposed an analytics infrastructure framework using deduction
graph techniques to assist managers in decision-making process (Fig. 7). By applying this
framework to the SPEC company, the results were in the preference of SPEC executives.
The framework would help managers to build a visual decision path that captures the logic
behind the number of decisions taking during the competence set method for evaluating.
The significance of this framework is counted in a better approach to structure the data and
connect the different streams of data to build a coherent picture of a specific problem.
Different big data tools offer different services for end users, which may offer different
capabilities of analysing and managing data in SCM. This study reports some of big data
tools being used in SCM during the period from 2010 to 2021, however; there are expected
new tools and enhancements that leverage the capabilities of big data analytics and manage-
ment tools in SCM. Firstly, the development of open-source machine learning and data min-
ing libraries in recent years has contributed to the success of big data platforms like Spark,
Hadoop, Flink, and others (Mohamed et al. 2020). However, numerous efforts have been
undertaken to build cloud computing technologies because of the amazing characteristics
of cloud computing, including its pervasive service-oriented nature and elastic processing
capacity (Mohamed et al. 2020). Another point is that big data tools remain mysterious for
many users (Mohamed et al. 2020). To bridge the gap between big data systems and their

Fig. 7 The adopted analytics infrastructure framework (Tan et al. 2015)

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Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a… S277

users, a user-friendly visualisation technique is required. The visualisation technique should

present the analytic results to users in such a way that they can effectively identify the inter-
esting results (Mohamed et al. 2020).

4 Research gaps and future direction

Based on the findings, there is a need to conduct further empirical studies on how big data
analytics can be optimised and managed in SCM. Our study revealed three certain gaps
in the research conducted on the optimisation and management of big data in SCM. We
expressed our understanding of these three gaps based on our analysis of the documents’
records, citations, and keywords in Section two and our findings and discussion in Section
three.
We summarized research gaps and possible directions that tackle these gaps in Table 9.
One of the main identified gaps in the available literature in both dimensions of big data
management and big data optimisation in the SCM is the lack of case studies and practical
examples. The reason is that the implementation of big data-related techniques in the SCM
has several challenges. One of the challenges is to optimise the hardware and software
setup to balance cost and performance. Conducting an empirical study to optimise the setup
is not cost-effective; it is time-intensive and difficult to control. As a result, simulation-
based methods are a viable alternative (Tiwari et al. 2018). Privacy, security, and quality of
data (Richey et al. 2016), data acquisition continuity, data cleansing, and data standardising
(Raghupathi and Raghupathi 2014) are mentioned as the other challenges.
Despite technological and data quality concerns, organisations cited culture and mana-
gerial issues as major roadblocks (Arunachalam et al. 2018). On the other hand, while the
computational technology required to manage and optimise big data are progressing, the
human expertise and abilities required by business executives to use big data are lagging
behind, posing another significant challenge (Barbosa et al. 2018) in this area.
Due to all of these challenges as well as the lack of interest among business managers
to publish their projects in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, there is a gap in scien-
tific publications including practical examples. To void this gap, maturity models can assist
organisations in assessing their existing technological capability in comparison to industry
standards (Arunachalam et al. 2018) and identifying the requirements for progressing their
big data projects. Cross collaboration among firms in the supply chain is the other alterna-
tive to overcome the challenge (Tiwari et al. 2018). Finally, partnership between academics
and supply chain executives is suggested to enhance the achievements of real-world projects
and enrich scientific publications.

5 Limitations of the review

There are several flaws in the literature review. The explorative technique, for example,
exposes the study to subjective bias, despite the fact that the exploratory review process
ensures a thorough examination of the research issue. There is a vast amount of secondary
data available from a variety of databases that may be analyzed to further research goals and
lay the groundwork for future investigations. Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest were

13
S278 I. Alsolbi et al.

Table 9 Research Gaps and possible future directions

Research Gap Future Direction
1- A shortage of Optimising big data is to achieve high performance in short time (Roy et al. 2018).
literature concern- Optimisation of big data analytics is in demand shaping in procurement, inventory
ing optimisation control systems, order picking in warehousing, in transit inventory management,
techniques in supply and dynamic vehicle routing in logistics. If the data is not well optimised, certain
chain functions using issues may occur such as inaccurate results of the analytics or delays in the pro-
case studies for cessing of the data. One direction is to use an optimization is a feature engineering
illustrations. technique. For example, in Python, Pandas.apply() is a library that provide a func-
tion of feature engineering which helps in creating new features of old features.
Another optimization technique is using multi data processing which helps in
supporting different tasks in Python. These techniques are to overcome handling
different amount of data in short time. Therefore, reporting results (through cases
studies) from using such the above optimisation techniques are required to provide
insights for professionals who may have similar interests to resolve this gap.
2- A shortage of It’s extremely difficult to store massive amounts of unstructured or heterogeneous
literature on the data from numerous data collectors in service, manufacturing, logistics, and other
exploitation of un- industries (Zhong et al. 2016). Unstructured and semi-structured text data abound
structured data. in the organisations and provide rich contextual information. In the application of
AI and ML applications, the industry sector is at least in part with the academia.
However, owing to such issues as restrictions due to data privacy and commercial
sensitivity, shortage of time, lack of interest in the culture, many projects do not
get published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Therefore, care must
be taken in the interpretation of publication space as exhaustive knowledge. It
might also be appropriate to include an industry practice survey section. Another
direction to void this gap is by conducting empirical studies of using cloud-based
storage. Cloud-based storage has the ability to provide unlimited and flexible stor-
age virtually to access the data (Zhong et al. 2016).

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Big data optimisation and management in supply chain management: a… S279

Table 9 (continued)
Research Gap Future Direction
3- A shortage of pub- There are a number of studies pertaining to supply chain simulations, using
lished literature on systems modelling. Frequently though, the studies make use of small and rich data
Systems Simulation and domain expertise in place of big data.
models on big data in Systems Models such as Agent Based Models, Supply Chain Models have been
the supply chain. employed variously and liberally in the supply chain domain. A number of studies
employed systems dynamics (top down, equation based) framework for supply
chain, a popular approach coming out of MIT. While the application of systems
dynamic approach has declined in favour of machine learning and agent-based
modelling in the recent years, Chen et al. (2013) employed this approach to study
the total logistic costs, Torkul et al. (2016) applied SD to ordering policy compari-
son, Sánchez-Ramírez et al. (2019) employed SD to model delivery capabilities.
Kiisler and Hilmola (2020) employed SD to study wholesale company supply
chain. For example, Chen et al. (2013) reviewed the state of the art of the applica-
tion of agent based modelling in supply chain risk management. The article also
concluded that agent-based modelling is an appropriate and promising tool for
modelling the complexity inherent in the supply chain networks. Chen et al. also
note the scarcity of studies that employ this viable and useful approach. While
these models exist in smaller scales, the application to big data is often limited by
product and data-flow variety and having to understand and specify markets, flows
and stocks top down often limits the application of SD.
In contrast, agent based modelling (ABM) provides for a bottom-up modelling of
complex processes such as supply chains (Macal and North 2009). In 2015, Riddle
et al. use ABM to study rare earth elements markets supply chains. In a recent
paper, Riddle et al. (2021) developed an agent-based models to predict market
fluctuations for rare earth elements, and ultimately study the risks of supply chain
disruptions. This research required the use of supercomputers, as the systems get
large, complex and realistic models become computationally very expensive. High
computational requirements are one of the reasons why big data-based agent-
based models in supply chains are not as common as machine learning or deep
learning models. Along with that, there is also shortage of skills that could handle
intersections areas of ABM and SD, big data, and machine learning.
The time taken to develop these models also an order of magnitude longer than
that taken to develop and a machine learning or deep learning model, and industry
often requires instant gratification (RoI). Besides, validating complex systems
models is a lot harder and requires a systematic approach (Bharathy and Silver-
man 2013). These are some of the reasons that systems models are not as popular
in studying big data applications in supply chain.

the only databases used in this study. Some papers, however, may have been overlooked
if the source was not found in these databases. Another constraint is that the sources were
limited to those publications that appeared between 2010 and 2021. More findings may have
been achieved if the chosen period had been longer. Other terminology, such as “decision
making” or “empowered data,“ may arise in studies focusing on non-profits. However, there
may be literature in this research topic that is irrelevant. Because the goal was to produce
particular results that matched the keyword lists, extending the period was not considered.

6 Conclusion

This paper adopts the content analysis methodology to conduct the systematic literature
review, whereby 37 journal articles were definitively relied upon on the search strategy
to offer a comprehensive outlook of how big data has been optimised in SCM. Also, we

13
S280 I. Alsolbi et al.

reviewed technologies mostly used for big data management in SCM. It is indisputable that
big data is extensively managed and optimised in supply chain functional areas to enhance
organisational effectiveness. Therefore, companies need to ensure proper management of
big data applications and related infrastructure. Different levels of big data optimisation and
management techniques are used to ensure effective and seamless supply chain operations.
Nonetheless, the review and discussion of findings reveal several research gaps that require
further studies to fill the void and develop the topic. Although technologically and organ-
isationally challenging, it is very important to publish papers including case studies and
practical examples to show the effectiveness and outcomes of optimising big data in real-
world supply chains. The other pressing area for future studies is managing and optimising
unstructured data and take advantage of the huge amount of data that is continuously gener-
ated by various data sources in supply chains. These issues can be addressed by the coop-
eration between supply chain managers and academic researchers, improving the culture
of managers to accept and employ new technologies, and enhance the skills of employees.
Furthermore, the literature review has several limitations; for instance, the use of explor-
atory methodology makes the study to be prone to subjective bias. By the way, the explor-
atory review method is significant since it ensures a comprehensive analysis of the research
topic. Besides, it is a flexible and inexpensive method for answering the research questions.
There is a massive volume of secondary data from numerous databases that can be exam-
ined to achieve the research objectives and lay the foundation for future studies based on
the gaps identified.

Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as
you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons
licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are
included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted
by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the
copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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https://doi.org/10.3115/1034678.1034679>
Fahimeh.HosseinniaShavaki@uts.edu.au
Renu.Agarwal@uts.edu.au
Gnana.Bharathy@uts.edu.au
shivprakash@cas.res.in
Mukesh.Prasad@uts.edu.au
1School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
3School of Information, System & Modelling, FEIT, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
4Department of Electronics and Communication

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
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Authors and Affiliations

Idrees Alsolbi1,2 · Fahimeh Hosseinnia Shavaki2 · Renu Agarwal3 · Gnana K Bharathy4 ·

Shiv Prakash5 · Mukesh Prasad2

Idrees Alsolbi
insolbi@uqu.edu.sa
Fahimeh Hosseinnia Shavaki
Fahimeh.HosseinniaShavaki@uts.edu.au
Renu Agarwal
Renu.Agarwal@uts.edu.au
Gnana K Bharathy
Gnana.Bharathy@uts.edu.au
Shiv Prakash
shivprakash@cas.res.in
Mukesh Prasad
Mukesh.Prasad@uts.edu.au
1
Department of Information Systems, College of Computer Science and Information Systems,
Umm Al- Qura University, Mecca, Saudi Arabia
2
School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia
3
Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia
4
ARDC Research Data Specialist, Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology,
University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia
5
Department of Electronics and Communication, University of Allahabad (A Central
University), Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India

13