Unveiling the Challenges of Future Supply Chains: An Explorative Analysis

This chapter focuses on the identification of challenges that supply chains of the future will most likely face. The primary input in this process are the potential optimistic/pessimistic/intermediate future scenarios based on trends within political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental dimensions.Based on such input, we present a list of major challenges/opportunities in relation to the design and operations of Supply Chains (SCs) in the near future. The preliminary list is calibrated and validated based on the input from industry stakeholders (to account for the perspectives of different supply chain actors such as buyers, suppliers, policy makers, and supply chain facilitators) in order to make sure that these challenges are indeed of practical relevance and grounded in reality. The aforementioned challenges are aggregated into several clusters aiming at providing decision makers with a tool that would enable them to quickly and easily spot the relevant challenges and take proper actions to mitigate any potential risk.