A systematic review of innovative technologies adopted in logistics management

Logistics and supply chain management have always been at the forefront of industrial innovations, and numerous technologies have been tested and applied with success to increase efficiency of processes, reduce costs, or improve the relationships among different actors, such as buyers, sellers, retailers and carriers. In recent times, there is a great debate in both practitioners and academic’ worlds about the impacts of these new technologies on the traditional logistic operations. The perspective of extant literature on technology adoption in logistics is quite fragmented: in fact, a stream of literature studies how a technology might provide improvements in logistics processes (e.g. warehouse management, goods distribution) and/or logistics management objectives (e.g. warehouse efficiency), while other research works focus on the impact of technology adoption in terms of overall business performance. Moreover, despite the amount of articles, reports and news regarding innovations in logistics, one of the last literature review about existing technologies applied in logistics has been published almost ten years ago and it is limited only to ICT technologies. Therefore, we reckon the need for an updated view on the literature in this field. Through a systematic literature review, we try to give an answer to the following research questions: i) how the interest in this topic changed in the last ten years from the point of view of scientific literature; ii) what are the main approaches and methodologies used in addressing this issue; iii) what are the most applied innovative technologies in the logistics field.