The Blockchain Application in Supply Chain Management: Opportunities, Challenges and Outlook

Abstract

Blockchain is a game changer in nowadays information technology and financial industry. Since Nakamoto invented the concept of blockchain together with its first application called “Bitcoin”, the topic of blockchain has been inundated with the booming of cryptocurrencies. People expect this novel distributed ledger technology to bring a revolution to the entire industry and thereby grab the opportunity to expand and strengthen their business. The supply chain is treated as a typical use case to adopt blockchain and relevant technologies in many previous studies. In this paper, we conduct an interdisciplinary study on business supply chain management and the latest distributed ledger technology. In accordance with our discussion and experiments, we list three major benefits that the adoption of blockchain is able to bring to contemporary supply chain management. Meanwhile, we also identify a few of challenges that the nowadays blockchain application could not effectively excel, and the potential mitigation to those challenges as well.