Industry 4.0: The Tenets of the Next Generation of Supply Chain Management

The supply chain industry is at the crossroads of the business revolution through the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), impacting business activities across industries. The transformative elements of 4IR offer individual consumers, corporations, and governments unprecedented opportunities to link, collaborate, process, and manage rising consumer and business data to boost decision-making, efficiency, and productivity. Evidence shows that have applied a mix of collaborative and innovative technologies to internal and external activities to manage supply chain disruptions. The groundbreaking technological advancements paved the way for the supply industry to shift supply business prototypes from traditional supply chain models to supply web models. The shift has helped firms resolve national and global supply chain disruptions. The present chapter introduces the Supply Web (SW) concept and its distinctive tenets by adding to the growing body of the evolving Industry 4.0 field, knowledge to help advance the field. The author calls on governments, the global supply industry, and academia to consider embracing the new SW paradigm evolving under 4IR to help resolve societal and consumer challenges emerging in the 21st Century.