Tools
Tools
Eade, Phillip Anthony (2022) Anticipating the impact of an intelligent agent on a supply chain. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
Responding to a highly competitive economy, today's Supply Chains are very different from those of just a few years ago. Supply Chains have evolved from linear models to become hyper-connected multi-layer networks. A driver of this transformation is the adoption of innovative technologies, including the Intelligent Agent. Increasingly these are transforming many aspects of business models and becoming a new solution to traditional and novel problems. Despite this recent increase in adoption, studies observe that research into the impact of lntelligent Agents on the Supply Chain is lacking, and there needs to be more skills and knowledge on how to adopt them.
In this context, the primary purpose of this study is to help fill, in its small way, this demonstrable gap in the body of scholarly knowledge by developing and testing a methodology to answer the research question, "How can we anticipate the impact of an Intelligent Agent on a Supply Chain?".
An initial review of the latest scholarly discourse on Supply Chains and Intelligent Agents is analysed with an application of the Grounded Theory approach to derive a new conceptual framework with which to categorise and review how various sub-topics of lntelligent Agents can help in multiple sub-fields of Supply Chain management. Guided by this conceptual framework, the second round of scholarly literature review informs this study on various instruments that may contribute to forming a methodology to answer the research question and a recommendation for field research to test these.
To minimise the risk that the findings from this study have a 'practice-research gap', an initial research phase consisting of semi-structured interviews with expert practitioners and a review of non-scholarly literature collects and analyses data on current industry practice in each area of the conceptual framework. Through consideration of the findings and the scholarly literature review, an original practice methodology is derived to be tested in real-world use cases.
The new practice methodology is applied and developed in three rounds of field research in real-world television production Supply Chains. Focus groups are used to collect data from modelling the Supply Chain and its processes, technologies, costs, and pain points. The benchmarking technique is used to gather data on the capabilities of lntelligent Agents for television production. Techniques are applied to anticipate the financial, non-financial, and people's wellbeing impact an Intelligent Agent will have on each Supply Chain. A final technique produces an Intelligent Agent action plan that considers the Supply Chain executive preferences and priorities, the dependencies between deliverables, and resource limitations.
The finding from this study is a new practice methodology that is easy-to-apply by a single practitioner in a timely manner, is flexible enough for the varied needs of different Supply Chain stages and provides recommendations that are understandable by both technical and non-technical audiences. These findings imply that the new practice methodology is suitable for application by researchers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the issues related to the impact that Intelligent Agents may have on Supply Chains and by practitioners to aid Intelligent Agent investment and deployment decision-making.
 |
View Item |