Social media in operations and supply chain management: State-of-the-Art and research directions

Abstract

Recently, industrial and academic communities in the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) field are paying increasing attention to social media. However, the value of social media in OSCM is quite unclear, and more investigations are still needed. To pave the way for a directed future research, this paper systematically reviewed and synthesised 152 peer-review journal papers to identify research focus and gaps in this area, supported by an appropriate conceptual framework. The result reveals that the research interests in this area have increased dramatically within the last decade across various industries and regions. Different companies' OSCM activities, such as sourcing and delivery, can benefit from employment of social media. This paper also indicates that future research can explore the value of social media in sourcing, delivery, product return and reverse logistics activities, forecasting and inventory management, and product development and production.

A Confirmation Bias View on Social Media Induced Polarisation During Covid-19

“…On the one hand, supply chain participants are actively looking for the modes, where they can capture the precise information and improve the visibility, control, and efficiency in their supply chain (Sodhi & Tang, 2019). On the other hand, supply chain activities are governed by participants who have their own pre-existing beliefs and attitudes that can lead to 'confirmation bias', which can negatively impact the supply chain activities (Huang et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2012;Zhao et al, 2020). Earlier studies on social media have majorly focused on identity, social power, social capital, and social loafing that led to polarisation based on individuals' attitudes, actions, and intentions for using social media (Dwivedi et al, 2018;Erkan & Evans, 2016;O'Leary, 2011;Rauniar et al, 2014;Rim et al, 2020).…”

“…Social media is increasingly being used by organisations to manage business activities and relationships among supply-chain stakeholders (Choi et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2020;Singh et al, 2018) including, new product development (Giannakis et al, 2020), service improvement (Fan & Niu, 2016), daily sales forecasts (Cui et al, 2019), and information dissemination (Kanagarajoo et al, 2019). The prevalence and speed at which social media platforms (e.g., WeChat, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, What-sApp) facilitate the exchange of real-time data (Gorwa & Guilbeault, 2020;Rousidis et al, 2020) has made it a popular tool for effective supply chain management (Choi et al, 2020).…”

Deep learning with long short-term memory networks and random forests for demand forecasting in multi-channel retail

“…Following the latest stream of research, applications of machine learning to develop data driven solutions to the problems of production and operations management (Kuo and Kusiak 2019;Shen, Choi, and Minner 2019;Huang, Potter, and Eyers 2019), this study proposes a new forecasting method to address the complex demand forecasting scenarios. The proposed method is based on a state-of-the-art sequential deep learning method -long-short-term-memory networks (hereafter, LSTM) and a machine learning method -random forest (hereafter, RF).…”

Utilizing social media in a supply chain B2B setting: A knowledge perspective

“…The usage of social media in SCM has become more prevalent and encompasses many different supply chain activities ranging from demand forecasting, prediction markets, inventory management, marketing, sourcing, product development and production, delivery, product returns and reverse logistics, to risk management (Huang et al 2020; Qiu, & Kumarb, 2017). However, most of the research on social media use in the SCM context to date has been business‐to‐consumer (B2C)‐related (Chae et al 2020).…”

“…Social media is one such digital tool and source that can provide enormous value in developing customer‐centric supply chains. Social media is critical to supply chain digitalization because it is not only a digital source that can provide volumes of valuable data, but is also a useful tool for enhancing communication efficiency and effectiveness to improve internal and external integration (Huang et al 2020; Sanders et al 2019). Social media is “a group of Internet‐based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61).…”