Digitalization and Supply Chain Accounting

Digital technologies have become an integral part of our private and business lives. Digital technologies change business processes, make entirely new data sources accessible, and open the way for new business models. Digitalization can exert considerable transformative power that affects—or even disrupt—business models and entire industries. Digitalization has also a high impact on global supply chains: Physical assets are equipped with new digital components and sensors. Barcodes, RFID, or NFC facilitate continuous tracking and tracing, Enterprise Resource Planning systems allow the integration of such data into a firm’s standard operating processes. Digital supply chains show improved performance in terms of speed, flexibility, transparency, and scalability. Digitalization has also had a dramatic impact on management accounting tasks. Automation of reporting or analysis tasks allows for higher efficiency and frees time for new jobs and functions. Digital technologies also enable new tasks and functions that previously were not possible. The amount of accessible data for MAC has increased, and MAC can now also employ state-of-the-art tools for the analysis of text or video data. Data on user behavior can be tracked and collected in real time and pooled with other data sources to provide a much more comprehensive information set for further analysis and decision-making. Digital technologies and tools have also created new applications in SCMAC. In this chapter, we discuss some selected examples, such as AI demand planning, smart warehouses, supply chain control towers, and digital twins.