Achieving efficiency and sustainability in digital retail supply chains: a systematic literature review and research agenda

Purpose The current research examines digitalization and advanced technologies operationalization as a central feature of logistics management for efficient and sustainable retail business model in supply chain management. This study’s purpose is to present the main retail practices enforced for retail supply chain (RSC) digitalization and to provide a comprehensive analysis of retail industry digitalization as a fundamental enabler of achieving RSC efficiency and sustainability performance. Design/methodology/approach This research conducts a five-step systematic literature review of 110 published empirical research articles selected from SCOPUS and Web of Science databases taking in consideration the principle of the deductive research approach in order to build up a condensed and unbiased synthesis of retail industry digitalization in achieving supply chain efficiency and sustainability. Furthermore, the current research employed a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to decipher the subject regions from the selected keywords and to build a cluster to comprehend the areas that retail digitalization impact supply chain efficiency and sustainability. Findings The outcomes indicate that for retailers, logistics practices embody the main sources of inefficiencies that dampen companies’ productivity and competitiveness. The investment in digital innovations and technologies represents a considerable opportunity to differ from the high competition and optimize more their operational performance in terms of efficiency and sustainability through supply chain links integration, logistics operations optimization, costs and waste minimization, resources management and customer behavior. Practical implications Numerous points have shed light on retail managers, digital officers and related partitioners for a deep and holistic comprehension of the digital transition of their firms’ business model and how can this transformation assist in achieving challenging issues faced by every industry which is maintaining operational sustainable efficiency. This framework could be used as a decision-making tool and develop a wide vision for every partner of the RSC on the potentials and opportunities that Industry 4.0 technologies can provide to address costs and resources management issues and to coordinate the corresponding investment efforts. Originality/value The traditional retail ecosystem in called into question facing today’s business world changes. This research contribution resides in the fact that it is one of the few research projects to concentrate on conceptualizing digitalization of logistics operations in RSC from for the effective retail processes improvement both from the efficiency and sustainability perspective.