A Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Quality Management Framework

Abstract

Recent quality scandals reveal the importance of quality management from a supply chain perspective. Although there has been many related studies focusing on supply chain quality management, the technologies used still have difficulties in resolving problems arising from the lack of trust in supply chains. The root reason lies in three challenges brought to the traditional centralized trust mechanism: self-interests of supply chain members, information asymmetry in production processes, costs and limitations of quality inspections. Blockchain is a promising technology to address these problems. In this paper, we discuss how to improve the supply chain quality management by adopting the blockchain technology, and propose a framework for blockchain-based supply chain quality management.