Challenges and opportunities of digitization on container shipping industry in supply chain perspective

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges and opportunities of digitization particularly in the container shipping industry and supply chain management. The era of technological advancement has caused fierce competition in the maritime industry. Furthermore, the maritime industry has always been fairly volatile and subject to cyclical and structural transformation, and the future is likely to present the industry with even more challenges.

The promise of data-driven decision-making is now being recognized widely, and there is an increase of interest in the notion of “big data” and “digitization”. Ultimately, big data is getting prevalent in shipping where large amounts of data are gathered to identify and optimized logistics, emissions, maintenance, vessel performance, and supply chain nodes. As shipping is currently on its way into their next revolution, there are numerous challenges and opportunities in on-line control and off-line analytics.

Therefore, this paper identifies and investigates the issues in implementing digitization to ensure the supply chain is more effective, agile, and customer-centric.