Smart dairy: Unleashing emerging ICT-enabled lean dairy supply chains through data-driven decision-making

• Digitalization of the supply chain to make it efficient and lean. • Gaining competitive advantages by using data-driven decision-making. • Modeling of the CSFSs to establish hierarchical inter-relationships among them. • Validation of the developed TISM with the help of hypothesis testing. • Analyze the CSFs based on driving power and dependence value by MICMAC. There is a greater awareness of safety issues, emerging risks, and challenges in dairy products. Lean philosophy is one of the strategies that significant corporations worldwide have tried to adopt to stay competitive in an increasingly global market. This paper presents the relationship between different critical success factors for the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enabled lean dairy supply chain. This study will help to bring leanness in the perishable supply chain by showing the interrelationship of digitalization and emerging Information and Communication Technologies like automation, cloud computing, big data, digital twins, metaverse, etc., with other critical success factors of the supply chain. This paper proposes a twelve-level hierarchical model to illustrate the inter-relationships among the critical success factors of the ICT-enabled lean dairy supply chain.