Understanding the role of demand and supply integration in achieving retail supply chain agility: An information technology capability perspective

With the popularity of e‐commerce business, the evolution of information technology (IT) has played an important role in the evolution of global retail industry over the past two decades. Although the existing supply chain theories have discussed the effects of demand management on supply chain; however, there is a lack of in‐depth theoretical discussions among demand and supply integration (DSI) and supply chain agility from an IT capability view. The purpose of this study is to explore the role of DSI in achieving retail supply chain agility. Based on the information processing theory, this study takes JD.com and Alibaba, China's largest retailers, as business cases to conduct empirical investigations. We offer semi‐structured interviews with senior executives from IT, operations, and marketing department, and depict the coding process of survey data through a multi‐disciplinary literature review, grounded theory, and case study method. For retail firms, this study opens the black box of the antecedent research of supply chain agility by information processing theory, and puts forward some practical inspirations about retail IT capability under the COVID‐19 epidemic era.