Leveraging social media for supply chain risk mitigation

Abstract

Companies are waking up to the tremendous potential of the large volumes of data available in various social media platforms. The presence of such data provides an opportunity to identify future trends and potential warning signals. However, projects involving such extensive use of social media data have not yet been undertaken by most organizations. Even the works of those few organizations that have used social media to improve their business operations, have typically been in the marketing domain. This project explores the opportunities of using Social Media Data to take identify potential supply chain risks. It first covers some of the major literature reviews in the field of supply chain risks and social media. Case studies where previously social media was used by organizations or researchers to identify future risks or market demand are covered in the secondary research. In the final part, the study attempts to build an adaptable framework to identify potential supply chain risks using data from social media. The frameworks provides the basic modules required for building such a system, the processes that needs to be carried out for collecting the social media data and the stages that must be followed in order to develop the function for calculating risk probability. The system on identifying possibility of a risk, signals the respective point of contact to look into it. For this study, Twitter is used the social media platform for early identification of any natural disruptions. However, the framework is generic in nature and can be suitably used for identification of any other supply chain risks by properly identifying the social media platform to be used for such risks.