Marjaneh Jahangiri Lahkani, Shouyang Wang, Mariusz Urbański, Mariya Egorova
Information technology advancements integrated with the e-commerce supply chain allow participants in the business process to effectively work with large volumes of data and control transactions. To improve the profitability and competitiveness of e-commerce companies, a blockchain solution was incorporated into the global B2B (Business-to-Business) supply chain. This technology simplified the transaction process by providing all participants in the sustainable B2B buying process with the same data about the trade. Overall, the use of blockchain improved the efficiency of logistics and digital documentation which reached 74% and 75%, respectively. The main advantage of using blockchain is that it creates a decentralized database that is secure. In addition, it increases the speed of payment and the reliability and transparency of data transfer. Further research may focus on the use of blockchain in green logistics to improve environmental sustainability in the e-commerce supply chain.
Companies trying to build new solutions using blockchain are confronted with\na plethora of available concurrent technologies that have many control knobs\nwhich require fine-tuning by experts. Exiting studies that build decision\nmodels for blockchain adoption or selection lack an automated way to use\nnon-functional requirements to provide recommendations. In this paper, we build\na knowledge base for blockchain solutions by analyzing whitepapers and studies,\nbut also our benchmark results performed in a controlled environment. Then, we\nimplement a Multi-Criterion Decision Analysis method to determine the most\nsuitable blockchain solution from companies provided requirements and\npreferences. Finally, we illustrate our approach by running the decision\nprocess on a realistic supply-chain use case. This paper provides a rationale\nfor blockchain deployment choices. While still limited in scope, we plan to\ninclude more blockchain alternative and more flexible requirements inputs in\nfuture work.\n
Sebastian Kummer, David M. Herold, Mario Dobrovnik, Jasmin Mikl · 5 authors
Potential blockchain applications in logistics and transport (LSCM) have gained increasing attention within both academia and industry. However, as a field in its infancy, blockchain research often lacks theoretical foundations, and it is not clear which and to what extent organizational theories are used to investigate blockchain technology in the field of LSCM. In response, based upon a systematic literature review, this paper: (a) identifies the most relevant organizational theories used in blockchain literature in the context of LSCM; and (b) examines the content of the identified organizational theories to formulate relevant research questions for investigating blockchain technology in LSCM. Our results show that blockchain literature in LSCM is based around six organizational theories, namely: agency theory, information theory, institutional theory, network theory, the resource-based view and transaction cost analysis. We also present how these theories can be used to examine specific blockchain problems by identifying blockchain-specific research questions that are worthy of investigation.
Blockchain implications within the sustainability domain are rapidly arousing the interest of researchers and institutions. However, despite the avalanche of articles, papers, and recently published books, innovation in the blockchain domain is still heavily influenced by light literature, such as news, articles, opinion posts, and white papers. Lacking a homogeneous literature background, case studies often fall into storytelling, providing mere descriptions of the facts according to the writers’ impressions and opinions. We therefore investigate blockchain adoption for sustainable purposes through a case study while remaining firmly grounded in three main theoretical literature streams: knowledge management, knowledge infrastructure, and trust. Since blockchain interaction with the real world is managed by oracles, addressing the oracle problem is essential in order to evaluate the effectiveness of blockchain for sustainability issues. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other paper has efficiently addressed this subject or even mentioned it. Recognizing its scarce consideration in the literature, the oracle problem will be analyzed in both theoretical and practical terms, thereby providing a way to solve the issues related to non-fungible products in the supply chain. Choice over the selected case study was made in light of the divergence in motives for the adoption of blockchain (economic over social), which makes the results more inferable at a broader scale and offers an insight into how sustainable innovations can also be economically viable.
Christian F. Durach, Till Blesik, Maximilian von Düring, Markus Bick
Blockchains, a disruptive technology with potentially many applications in modern‐day supply chain (SC) transactions, have not been adequately reflected by theory. Researchers and business managers must understand where and when blockchains’ application may be expected and investigated. The present study clarifies the discussion about blockchain application areas (BAAs) in SC transactions and their relevance for businesses. This study combines the findings from three methodological approaches: an extant literature review, a Delphi study, and a survey of 151 German machinery and equipment sector business managers. The results further our understanding of blockchains’ business opportunities among SC transactions and verify and extend Iansiti and Lakhani’s ( Harvard Business Review 2017; 95: 118) blockchain adoption framework. Verified customer reviews and product quality certification are identified as the most relevant blockchain usages in SC transactions. Interestingly, we anticipate the least likely adoption of blockchains to occur for document‐signing processes despite arguments within the literature that suggest otherwise. Two newly identified BAAs—logistics and delivery systems—and token‐curated registries rank among the top four most relevant. The present study’s valuation of BAAs advances theory and will likely affect business strategies by indicating where, when, and why businesses should participate in blockchain networks.
<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Manufacturers often face capital constraints when opening up online channel, at this time external financing and internal financing are usually considered. Previous literature has shown that internal financing, turns out to be a better option. To figure out how trade credit financing discount contract affects operations and performances of supply chain, this paper studies the pricing decision of a retailer-dominant dual-channel supply chain with manufacturer's capital constraints. The Stackelberg game models under centralized decision and decentralized decision are constructed. Moreover, this paper conducts research about the effects of revenue-sharing (RS) contract, direct channel price discount (DP) contract and retail channel price discount (RP) contract on the performance of supply chain. Numerical examples are provided to explore the comparison of the optimal pricing strategies and total profits under different contracts. The results show that the retailer prefers RS and DP contracts to RP contract. Among them, RS contract has a broader scope of coordination, while DP contract can achieve a higher profit. The results can serve as insights for decision-makers to choose the most appropriate financial discount contract.
Rameshwar Dubey, Angappa Gunasekaran, David Bryde, Yogesh K. Dwivedi · 5 authors
There has been tremendous interest in blockchain technology (BT) (also known as distributed ledger technology) around the globe and across sectors. Following significant success in the financial sector, other sectors, such as humanitarian sector, have started deploying BT at various levels. Although the use of BT in the humanitarian sector is in its infancy, donors and government agencies are increasingly calling for building BT-enabled swift-trust (ST) and more collaborative relationships among various humanitarian actors in order to improve the transparency and traceability of disaster relief materials, information exchanges and flow of funds in disaster relief supply chains. Our study, which is informed by organisational information processing theory and relational view, proposes a theoretical model to understand how BT can influence operational supply chain transparency (OSTC) and ST among actors engaged in disaster relief operations. Our model also shows how BT-enabled ST can further improve collaboration (CO) among actors engaged in disaster relief operations and enhance supply chain resilience (SCR). We formulated and tested six research hypotheses, using data gathered from international non-governmental organisations with the help of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) database. We received 256 usable responses using a pre-tested survey-based instrument designed for key informants. Our results confirm that our six hypotheses were supported. Our study offers significant and valid contributions to the literature on ST, CO and SCR and BT/distributed ledger technology. We have also noted the limitations of our study and have offered future research directions.
Saidjahon Hayrutdinov, Mahmoud S. R. Saeed, Azamat Rajapov
The study proposes a supply chain contractual coordination model based on the product lifecycle information sharing effort and consumers' price sensitivity to a product with the Blockchain system. This paper examined the following five scenarios: (1) centralized supply chain with Blockchain system-based product lifecycle information sharing investment; (2) Stackelberg leader retailer processed and invested Blockchain system scenario; (3) retailer processed the Blockchain system cost-sharing scenario; (4) retailer processed Blockchain system investment through bargaining the revenue-sharing model; (5) Blockchain system investment under the cost and revenue-sharing contract. The study used the game theory reverse induction method to compare the Nash equilibrium solutions under different decision-making scenarios and discussed the chain member’s constraint condition of Blockchain system investment. We simulated and analysed the products’ lifecycle information sharing effort cost factor, the influence of price sensitivity coefficient, and expected profits of the supplier and retailer. The study results show that the product lifecycle information sharing effort under the Blockchain system increases the profit of the whole chain and decreases with the increase of customer’s price sensitivity coefficient.
In this paper, a Blockchain-driven platform for supply chain finance, BCautoSCF (Zhi-lian-che-rong in Chinese), is introduced. It is successfully established as a reliable and efficient financing platform for the auto retail industry. Due to the Blockchain built-in trust mechanism, participants in the supply chain (SC) networks work extensively and transparently to run a reliable, convenient, and traceable business. Likewise, the traditional supply chain finance (SCF), partial automation of SCF workflows with fewer human errors and disruptions was achieved through smart contract in BCautoSCF. Such open and secure features suggest the feasibility of BCautoSCF in SCF. As the first Blockchain-driven SCF application for the auto retail industry in China, our contribution lies in studying these pain points existing in traditional SCF and proposing a novel Blockchain-driven design to reshape the business logic of SCF to develop an efficient and reliable financing platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the auto retail industry to decrease the cost of financing and speed up the cash flows. Currently, there are over 600 active enterprise users that adopt BCautoSCF to run their financing business. Up to October 2019, the BCautoSCF provides services to 449 online/offline auto retailors, three B2B asset exchange platforms, nine fund providers, and 78 logistic services across 21 provinces in China. There are 3296 financing transactions successfully completed in BCautoSCF, and the amount of financing is ¥566,784,802.18. In the future, we will work towards supporting a full automation of SCF workflow by smart contracts, so that the efficiency of transaction will be further improved.
Blockchain technology has received significant attention recently, as it offers a reliable decentralized infrastructure for all kinds of business transactions. Software-producing organizations are increasingly considering blockchain technology for inclusion into their software products. Selecting the best fitting blockchain platform requires the assessment of its functionality, adaptability, and compatibility to the existing software product. Novice software developers and architects are not experts in every domain, so they should either consult external experts or acquire knowledge themselves. The decision-making process gets more complicated as the number of decision-makers, alternatives, and criteria increases. Hence, a decision model is required to externalize and organize knowledge regarding the blockchain platform selection context. Recently, we designed a decision support system to use such decision models to support decision-makers with their technology selection problems in software production. In this article, we introduce a decision model for the blockchain platform selection problem. The decision model has been evaluated through three real-world case studies at three software-producing organizations. The case-study participants asserted that the approach provides significantly more insight into the blockchain platform selection process, provides a richer prioritized option list than if they had done their research independently, and reduces the time and cost of the decision-making process.
In the past, it was difficult to check, identify, and trace product quality. Quality violation regularly takes place when consumers know product quality is overstated. In this paper, we examine the motivation for and implication of a supply chain that adopts blockchain technology to improve product quality in supply chains. We build up a stylish model in which a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer. The manufacturer decides whether or not to adopt blockchain and the retailer sells products to consumers. Our results imply that the manufacturer always provides a low-quality product without blockchain but when the quality-cost ratio is sufficiently high with the affordable blockchain adoption cost, blockchain technology could encourage the manufacturer to produce high-quality products.
Shaker Atyan K Alharthi, Paul Cerotti, Shaghayegh Maleki Far
In recent years, there have been many problems in information integration among key pharmaceutical supply chain players in KSA. This issue has resulted in problems such as medication shortage, lack of coordination among healthcare stakeholders, product wastage, and lack of demand information. However, blockchain, as a distributed digital ledger technology which ensures transparency, traceability, and security, is showing promise for easing some supply chain management problems. Local and global government, community, and consumer pressures to meet sustainability goals prompt us to further investigate how blockchain can address and aid supply chain sustainability. This study aims to explore the impact of blockchain technology implementation on the sustainability of the pharmaceutical supply chain. The objectives of this study are to identify the current information system infrastructure in the pharmaceutical supply chain of KSA, to examine the barriers and challenges of blockchain adoption, and to examine the barriers and challenges of blockchain implementation. This study will use a qualitative research method and the data will be collected through semi-structured interviews with a sample of 30 participants in KSA. This research is expected to contribute to the development of a framework for blockchain adoption in the pharmaceutical supply chain and to explore the role of blockchain in sustainability efforts. In addition, it will help managers, practitioners, consultants and decision makers who are interested in a deeper understanding of blockchain and its implementation, and will evaluate its influence on SSCM.
Sen Liu, Yanan Hu, Xiao Zhang, Yanfeng Li · 5 authors
The emergence of blockchain technology has significantly changed the underlying infrastructure of existing information technology and will fundamentally affect the production modes of enterprises. However, because the application of blockchain is still in its infancy, it is difficult for an enterprise to develop a comprehensive assessment of various types of blockchain service providers in the market. Hence, enterprises need scientific decision tools to estimate which blockchain service provider is appropriate. However, few studies have focused on this phenomenon. Therefore, to address this challenge, this investigation proposes a novel integrated multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) method to help enterprises estimate which blockchain vendor is more appropriate by considering more comprehensive influence factors. The proposed method is defined in an intuitionistic fuzzy environment and integrates entropy and the best-worst method (BWM) for comprehensive weighting of decision makers (DMs), subjective criteria and objective criteria in the decision-making process to make the decision results more reliable and reasonable. A numerical example and comparison are provided to illustrate the practicability and usefulness of the method. This study enriches the theory and methodology of blockchain technology and MAGDM analysis.
Supply chain management is considered one of the main sectors of development for blockchain technology. This study provides solid contributions to understanding blockchain innovation and presents some main features and guidelines for how to boost blockchain implementation in industry. As explorative research, this paper presents a grounded theory analysis based on 18 expert interviews. The pool of interviewees is composed of academics and business and institutional representatives with relevant technological knowledge on blockchain and innovation management. Renowned worldwide experts provided us with powerful input to run this analysis and with a general overview of the current situation. Blockchain development of course impacts supply chains, but currently, the analysis shows that it does not seem to be a disruptive technology. In accordance with C.M. Christensen, blockchain presents all the features to be a sustaining innovation rather than disruptive. For this reason, as outcomes, we present five enablers that can foster prompt adoption in industry.
Blockchain is expected to have a transformational effect on supply chain and logistics due to its promise to improve the information flow between the supply chain partners. However, despite their high hopes, incumbent companies from supply chain and logistics are still struggling to deliver on this promise. In this explorative, qualitative interview study, we identify how incumbent companies try to make use of Blockchain in supply chain and logistics and we also analyze the barriers hampering them. The analysis of twenty-four semi-structured expert interviews and extensive secondary data collates a comprehensive picture of incumbent companies' activities around Blockchain adoption. We find that companies use Blockchain to drive digital transformation, constitute new business models and unify the industry through consortia. The main barriers to such solutions are a lack of technological usability and long-term uncertainties. The results of our study provide evidence for theoretical constructs and guide managerial practice.
Providing transparency and trust among participants and stakeholders and ensuring an efficient operation are current supply chain challenges. These challenges are difficult to resolve because the records of supply chains may be exposed to alterations by participants. Blockchain technology has been identified as a promising solution to resolve these challenges. In this paper, we introduce blockchain and survey recent blockchain frameworks that address some of the supply chain challenges. We describe the components and operation of these blockchain frameworks. We identify the objectives and motivation in each of the surveyed use cases and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each adopted framework. We analyze how the reported blockchain frameworks address different supply chain challenges. We present a comparative summary of existing literature on blockchain for supply chain. We also summarize the properties of a blockchain framework for its successful adoption in future supply chains and discuss several remaining challenges and opportunities.
Luh Putu Mahyuni, Richard Adrian, Gede Sri Darma, Ngakan Nyoman Kutha Krisnawijaya · 6 authors
This paper aims at reviewing and systematically mapping research on blockchain potentials in improving supply chain performance. Articles were retrieved from several prominent databases, selected, reviewed, grouped into several themes and synthesized. This paper suggests that applying blockchain in the supply chain could improve its performance in terms of transparency, traceability, sustainability, trust, and cost-efficiency. As a cutting-edge technology, blockchain has not been widely implemented in supply chain industries. Research on blockchain application in the supply chain is also relatively limited. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a comprehensive map of research on blockchain potentials in improving supply chain performance. The findings of this study will also be beneficial for managers who seek for a comprehensive understanding of how blockchain technology affects their companies particularly in supply chain management.
Due to the increasing complexity of supply chains over the past years, many factors significantly contribute to lowering the supply chains performance. Poor visibility is one of the major challenging factors that lowers supply chains performance. This paper proposes a Blockchain-based supply chain network model to improve the supply chain visibility. The model focuses in improving the visibility measurements properties: information sharing, traceability, and inventory visibility. The proposed model consists of information sharing, traceability, and inventory visibility platforms based on Blockchain technology smart contract. The model built with Hyperledger platform and extend the Hyperledger Composer Supply Chain Network (HCSC) model. The research is designed to three main phases. First phase: the preliminary phase which is the literature review phase to identify the existing challenges in the domain. The second phase: the design and implementation phase which is the development steps of the proposed research model. The third phase: the evaluation phase which represent the performance evaluation of the proposed model and the comparisons between the proposed model and the existing models. In the evaluation performance, the common performance metrics Lead time and average inventory levels will be compared in the proposed model, Cloud-based information system, and the traditional supply chain. These proposed platforms offer an end-to-end visibility of products, orders, and stock levels for supply chain practitioners and customers within supply chain networks. Which helps managers’ access key information that support critical business decisions and offers essential criteria for competitiveness and therefore, enhance supply chain performance.
Changli Lu, Zhao Ming, Imran Ahmad Khan, Peerapong Uthansakul
Cap-and-trade regulation provides incentives for manufacturers to reduce carbon emissions, but manufacturers’ insufficient capital can disrupt the implementation of low-carbon emission reduction technologies. To alleviate capital constraints, manufacturers can adopt external financing for low-carbon emission reduction investments. This paper studies the independent financing and financing cooperation behavior in a supply chain in which the manufacturer and retailer first implement low-carbon emission reduction technologies and then organize production and sales in accordance with wholesale price contracts. Through comparing the optimal profits and low-carbon emission reduction levels under the independent financing and financing cooperation mode, we come to the following conclusions: (1) Although financing interest increases the cost of the supply chain, manufacturers prefer to invest in reducing carbon emissions rather than buying carbon quotas. (2) When financing independently, a decentralized decision-making mode (MD) is the best choice for manufacturers. (3) In cooperative financing, when the supply chain adopts a decentralized decision-making mode (SD) in which the retailer determines the financing cost-sharing ratio according to their optimal profit, the profits of the supply chain and its members are significantly improved. (4) When manufacturers and retailers adopt a centralized decision-making model (SC) in cooperative financing, they jointly determine the financing cost-sharing ratio and the level of low-carbon emission reduction. If the financing cost-sharing ratio meets a certain threshold range, the profits of manufacturers and retailers achieve Pareto improvement, indicating that this cooperative financing model is effective.
Globalisation, shorter product life cycles, and increasing product varieties have led to complex supply chains. At the same time, there is a growing interest of customers and governments in having a greater transparency of brands, manufacturers, and producers throughout the supply chain. Due to the complex structure of collaborative manufacturing networks, the increase of supply chain transparency is a challenge for manufacturing companies. The blockchain technology offers an innovative solution to increase the transparency, security, authenticity, and auditability of products. However, there are still uncertainties when applying the blockchain technology to manufacturing scenarios and thus enable all stakeholders to trace back each component of an assembled product. This paper proposes a framework design to increase the transparency and auditability of products in collaborative manufacturing networks by adopting the blockchain technology. In this context, each component of a product is marked with a unique identification number generated by blockchain-based smart contracts. In this way, a transparent auditability of assembled products and their components can be achieved for all stakeholders, including the customer.