Graduate School of Informatics /Information Systems

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Ayşe Begüm Kılıç will defend his thesis.

Title: INVESTIGATING THE TRANSFORMATION OF SUPPLY CHAINS INTO DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAINS BY USING SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY: A CASE STUDY

Date: th August 2018

Time: 13:30 AM

Place: A-212

Thesis Abstract :Currently, Industry 4.0 is trending topic among researchers. Basically, it promises firms higher profits by using technologies that are more advanced. In order to benefit from Industry 4.0, digitization of all company operations is essential for companies. That is why today, examining the transformation into the digital world has a significant role for the future. This thesis aims to investigate the transformation of supply chains into digital supply chains (DSC) in firm level by using Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). SSM enables researchers to analyze and define a problem to find out its real causes and suggest changes to solve it. SSM does not require quantitative data for analysis and is suitable for not fully defined and not well-known problems. Since the changes in the shifting from regular supply chains to DSC are not defined with numeric data and it is hard to define all the expected transformation clearly, the SSM methodology is chosen to follow. A case study applied to a firm will be conducted via interview technique within the thesis. The SSM is expected to be beneficial on analyzing the subjective data that will be provided by these interviews. At the end of the thesis, it is predicted to define the real-world transformation process and offer suggestions to firms in order to cope with the change