Purpose This paper aims to explore the potential of blockchain technology (BT) to support the operational excellence in perishable food supply chain (PFSC) during outbreaks, by doing use-case analysis. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review is performed to determine the dimensions of operational excellence in the food supply chain (FSC), then a single use-case analysis is conducted to explore the potential of blockchain in order to achieve operational excellence for PFSC during the pandemics by applying context, interventions, mechanism and outcomes (CIMO) logic. Findings The findings of this study reveal that blockchain capabilities such as immutability and transparency, visibility, traceability, integration and interoperability, disintermediation and decentralisation, smart contracts and consensus mechanism provide better sustainable operational excellence outcomes for PFSCs to be more responsive, flexible, efficient and collaborative to cope with the impacts of COVID-19. Research limitations/implications This research employs only one real case with multiple PFSC participants. Statistical generalisation is not possible at this stage of the research. However, the findings are not restricted to this single use-case. Practical implications This study provides a research direction to explore the potential of BT to achieve operational excellence in the PFSC during outbreaks and generates prescriptive knowledge for better managerial decision-making across the PFSC during outbreaks. Originality/value This research conducts semi-structured interviews with different participants in one blockchain ecosystem to understand multiple participants' perspectives of operational excellence within PFSC.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a decentralization of the workforce in many industries. Due to the stay-at-home orders to control the spread of the virus, many are working from home. Even though modern technological advancements have helped some companies adapt to this new norm, many others are still scrambling to find the best way to remotely manage employees and accommodate their needs. Our research shows that the current challenges organizations face in managing their human capital are like the ones they face due to workplace demographic changes. This study focuses on analyzing those challenges and how human competency can be unlocked and developed to encourage sustainable autonomous working in an office, at home, or during frequent traveling. This study investigates the challenges faced by both organizations and employees, and presents a new business model that helps with the sustainable use of human resources and improves employee efficiency.
Raja Zuraidah Raja Mohd Rasi, Umol Syamsyul Rakiman, Raja Zahilah Raja Mohd. Radzi, Nor Ratna Masrom · 5 authors
As blockchain technology is continuously evolving, questions arise regarding the possible risk of implementing blockchain technology in supply chain management (SCM). Prominent among these concerns is the risk that may negatively influence SCM and consider the potential solution to managing the risk. This study adopts an integrative review method. An online search is performed by considering relevant keywords related to “blockchain technology risks” closely connected with the SCM context within the period of 2017 until 2021. Several major risks are identified—privacy, regulatory, financial, technological, fraud, and operational risk. This article adopts an integrative literature review method to select relevant literature related to blockchain technology implementation in the supply chain. The integrative literature review method is suitable for this study since the risk of implementing blockchain technology is often shadowed by the benefits of implementing blockchain technology in SCM. The findings are highlighted by categorizing the potential risk that must be recognized in SCM to accompany the blockchain technology and the importance of rectifying the risk according to the organization's capacity and resources.
This chapter considers food governance and how it frames crisis management and product recalls in food supply chains. Effective food recalls following a food safety or legality related incident are supported by traceability systems ranging from paper based to those that apply the newest technology. This chapter is considers the value of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) for improvements in food supply chain governance structures that are especially tested during product recalls. The focus is on identifying advantages of Blockchain systems within public-private partnerships (PPPs) for food governance. There is great potential to reduce information asymmetry, a key barrier to supply chain development, innovation and efficiency, and effective crisis management and product recalls with the use of DLTs including Blockchain. PPPs for supply chain governance deliver value at the supply chain and wider stakeholder level including developing Blockchain consortia to improve overall efficiency and integrity in data collection, storage and sharing.
In supply chains where stakeholders belong to the economically disadvantaged segment and form an important part of the supply chain distribution, the complexities grow manifold. Fisheries in developing nations are one such sector where the complexity is not only due to the produce being perishable but also due to the livelihood dependence of others in the coastal regions that belong to the section of economically disadvantaged. This paper explains the contextual challenges of fish supply chain in a developing country and describes how integrating disruptive technologies can address those challenges. Through a positive deviance approach, we show how firms can help unorganized supply chains with economically disadvantaged suppliers by carefully redesigning the supply chain through the integration of satellite imagery and blockchain technology. With COVID-19 in the backdrop, we highlight how such technologies significantly improves the supply chain resilience and at the same time contributes to the income generating opportunities of poor fisherfolks in developing nations. Our study has important implications to both developing markets and food supply chain practitioners as this paper tackles issues such as perishability, demand-supply mismatch, unfair prices, and quality related data transparency in the entire value chain.
New Zealand’s rising demand for new and affordable homes is driving innovative and effective methods for project delivery. Prefabrication or off-site construction is considered an innovative approach to project delivery that eliminates the limitations of traditional construction methods. However, the prefabrication industry struggles with several challenges, including poor coordination and low supply chain integration amongst its partner organisations. There has been previous literature on improving the prefabrication supply chain integration, but few studies about the role of technology in this sector. Therefore, this article provides intuitions into the applicability and benefits of advanced technologies, namely blockchain, for improving supply chain integration in the context of prefabrication in New Zealand. A questionnaire survey was used to identify the channels used for information exchange between clients and contractors. Moreover, the questionnaire ascertained the positive effects of blockchain on enhancing supply chain integration between the two partners. Blockchain has proven to be a secure information integration instrument that can improve the integration of the prefabrication supply chain by fostering collaboration between organisations.
Project delivery on time, with agreed quality and assigned budget, is the desire of project-based companies. Time, quality, and cost are determinants of project success; however, organisations suffer from achieving these three success criteria at the same time. Failures in project delivery cause the loss of the competitive advantage. The recent digital technologies introduce smart contracts to supply chain (SC) operations for improving SC processes. Project procurement is the area for smart contract implementation to deliver successful projects and gain sustainable competitive advantages. The aim of this study was in explaining how smart contracts benefit project organisations through project procurement. Qualitative research design guided this research with phenomenology. Semi-structured interviews generated the data. The obtained research data were analysed with thematic, textual, and discourse analysis. Published industry reports were used to triangulate the data. This study demonstrated an integrated relationship model to answer the research question. The research findings initially identified the fact that smart contracts improve procurement efficiency through cost, time, and quality. Secondly, smart contracts build a trust-less platform where reliability is delivered and reinforced with transparency, traceability, and security. This study found that enhanced procurement efficiency and reliability meet requirements to gain sustainable competitive advantages. This study intends to contribute to industry practices and future research. The correlation of project procurement management success, smart contracts, and sustainable competitive advantages are expected to guide feature research and business practices.
This paper aims to highlight the critical problems associated with the construction supply chain (CSC) by analyzing the literature and shedding light on the existing research limitations and gaps. Moreover, this research aims to explore the applications of emerging blockchain technology in addressing the identified CSC issues and initiating the process of bridging the body of knowledge gap by proposing future research directions. The review demonstrates that the critical problems in the CSC are related to sustainability, collaboration, and information sharing. Existing CSC studies focus on each individual issue, and they have not yet tackled these key intertwined issues through a holistic system view approach. This research put into context the intertwined relationship of these key issues and proposes a supply chain management system coupled with emerging blockchain technology to enhance sustainability, promote collaboration, and facilitate information sharing. These findings are synthesized with different reviews of the literature on the use of blockchain applications in supply chains to propose a blockchain-enabled CSC that can fill the research gaps. The proposed blockchain applications in the CSC involve establishing a blockchain-enabled supplier selection and assessment, blockchain-assisted claims auditing, forensic analysis and dispute resolution, and smart contract-based governance to enforce a reward and punishment system that can facilitate information sharing, and thus promote collaboration. The integration of the two different literature reviews contributes to the body of knowledge by highlighting the research gaps in the existing CSC studies and providing opportunities for improvement through the use of an emerging state-of-art technology: blockchain. Furthermore, the construction industry can enhance its sustainability and promote collaboration and information sharing in its supply chains by leveraging the proposed applications.
Vinay Surendra Yadav, A.R. Singh, Rakesh D. Raut, Naoufel Cheikhrouhou
Abstract Blockchain has the potential to improve sustainable food security due to its unique features like traceability, decentralized and immutable database, and smart contract mechanisms. However, blockchain technology is still in the early stages of adoption in particular in agricultural applications. In this context, this article aims to identify blockchain drivers to achieve sustainable food security in the Indian context and model them using an integrated MCDM (Multiple Criteria Decision Making) approach. The blockchain adoption drivers are identified through an exhaustive literature review and opinions from domain experts from industry, academia, and Agriculture Supply Chain (ASC) stakeholders. Subsequently, the integrated MCDM approach is developed by combining Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM) and Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), which does not only investigate the interrelation between the identified constructs and builds hierarchy but also determines the intensity of the causal interrelationships. At a later stage, Fuzzy Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC) is used to cluster the identified drivers to evaluate the importance of each driver. The results reveal that Traceability, Real-time information availability to agro-stakeholder, and Decentralized and immutable database are the most significant drivers. Policymakers, governmental organizations and other relevant stakeholders may utilize the information about the interrelationship between these drivers and their influential power, to frame suitable strategies for enhancing the adoption rate of blockchain in the Indian ASC.
The research intends to examine the impacts of the technology, organization, and environmental factors on the implementation of blockchain in the supply chains of SMEs in the Kingdom of Tonga. These include regulatory support, competitive pressure, cost, upper management support, complexity, and relative advantage. The research uses SEM-PLS to test the hypotheses and the Artificial Neural Network method to analyze and classify survey data from 201 SMEs. Findings show that relative advantage, cost, complexity, and competitive pressure significantly affect implementing blockchain in the supply chains. As SMEs frequently have limited capital to invest in technology but meets the same obligations to streamline business operations to optimize profits, blockchain provides a feasible choice for the firms’ sustainability with its characteristics of security, transparency, and immutability that are prospective to develop SMEs’ performance. Thus, the paper provides novel insight regarding the determinants of SMEs' intention to implement blockchain in their supply chains.
This study aimed to investigate the relationships between blockchain adoption barriers and identified the salient stakeholders for blockchain adoption in containerized international trade. The interpretative structural modelling and Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification analyses indicated that the most impactful among the eight barriers are lack of support from influential stakeholders, lack of understanding regarding blockchain, and lack of government regulations. The stakeholder mapping analysis demonstrated that the high salient stakeholders among 11 legitimate stakeholders are container lines, ports, beneficial cargo owners, freight forwarders/third party logistics, and customs authorities. The study is original and contributes to theory and practice as it uncovers both impactful barriers and critical stakeholders by adopting a stakeholder theory perspective and offers significant implications to practice, policy, and theory by combining these two analyses.
Purpose The purpose of this methodology is to categorise the challenges into cause and effect group. The modern scenario of customization, personalization and multi-restrictive working because of pandemics has affected the operations of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In the new normal, the digitalization of manufacturing SMEs can be the path breaker. Modern digitalization includes a mix of technologies such as the industrial internet of things (IIoT), the internet of things, cyber-physical system and big data analytics. This digitalization can help in achieving new design changes, efficient production scheduling, smart manufacturing and unrestricted on-time delivery of quality products. This research paper aims to recognize and analyze the challenges faced while implementing IIoT technologies in manufacturing SMEs and tries to find the possibility of mitigating challenges by blockchain technology. Design/methodology/approach There were ten challenges of IIoT implementation identified from the literature review and experts’ opinions. To collect information from Indian manufacturing SMEs, a survey tool was formed in the form of a questionnaire. On the fundament of responses received from industrial experts, the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) technique has been used for categorizing these challenges into cause and effect groups. Further, the authors tried to mitigate observed challenges with the help of blockchain technology. Findings With the implementation of IIoT technologies, the manufacturing processes become conciliatory, effective and traceable in real time. Observation of the current study states that the top effect group challenges such as the security of data and reliability of technologies can be mitigated by enabling blockchain technologies. The authors conclude that blockchain-enabled IIoT technologies will be highly beneficial for the Indian SMEs strategically and practically in the current scenario. Research limitations/implications Methodology of DEMATEL focuses on responses received from experts. The broader approach of survey from manufacturing organizations is compromised due to small sample size in this methodology. Experts approached for survey were from manufacturing SMEs of Delhi National Capital Region only. Broader survey-based techniques may be applied covering different sectors of SMEs in future work. Practical implications Technologies such as blockchain can facilitate advanced security in the application of IIoT and other such practices. While dealing with significant issues and challenges of new technologies, blockchain gives an edge of balance in the current scenario. Its properties of fixity, temper evident and circumvent fraud make this technology ideal for the digitalization of the manufacturing systems in SMEs. Originality/value Digitalization of manufacturing facilities is the need of the hour. Pandemic challenges have highlighted the urgency of it. This research will motivate and guide the manufacturing SMEs in planning strategies and long-term policies in implementing modern technologies and coping up with the pandemic challenges.
Background: The use of blockchain technology for tracking and tracing (T&T) in supply chains is the subject of lively debate in scientific literature. However, distributed ledger technology (DLT) does not have to have the characteristic blockchain structure and often performs better without such a structure. Generalized DLT for T&T in supply chains has rarely been discussed in the existing literature. Methods: This article presents an exploratory case study research of eight companies to identify the main goals, and problems that the companies have when they engage in T&T. This practical perspective is complemented by a theoretical systems thinking perspective. Based on these two foundations, we discuss the usefulness of blockchain technology and, more generally, DLT for T&T in supply chains. Results: Based on our analysis, DLT is only necessary in special cases, e.g., when the owners of the data have an interest in deleting the data, but the data stakeholders do not. In the other cases examined, DLT competes with other technologies, such as conventional, centralized databases in combination with digital signatures. Furthermore, it became evident that DLT can only be useful for supply chain tracing. The technological features of DLT do not provide any benefit for supply chain tracking, i.e., the timely communication of the status of a physical good. Conclusions: Distributed ledgers often have a disadvantage in that they are very complex and, therefore, expensive. DLT should preferably only be used when it is technologically necessary or the simplest/cheapest choice, which is probably not all that often. Finally, the usefulness of distributed ledger technology and its integrated smart contract technology is highly dependent on how easy it is to link the real physical world to a digital record/contract in an error-free and tamper-proof way. Currently, such a definite link exists only in very few cases and is often impossible.
Companies manage their product portfolios to create value. Products and associated materials are important flows that link supply chains entities from upstream to downstream. Product deletion is a critical decision in product portfolio management. Current product management literature has predominantly targeted product proliferation, growth, and extension. Product deletion research is relatively and severely limited. Product deletion decisions are less appealing to managers; often due to significant operational changes and disruptions deletion creates within the firm and along the supply chain. Quality information and data can support sound product deletion decision making. Blockchain technology is a valuable tool that can effectively address information governance challenges in supply chains. To this end, we theoretically position blockchain technology as a governance mechanism supporting supply chain relational governance using relational view theory. This paper provides insights into the practice of blockchain and product deletion within a supply chain context. Theoretical and managerial implications are provided as we seek to link supply chain-related product deletion decision processes within blockchain technology supported information governance. There are promising potentials in both fields, Additional research development is needed to effectively manage in this environment and has broader implications for product portfolio management in the supply chain.
Rashid Amiri Ara, Klara Paardenkooper, Ron van Duin
Purpose This paper aims to propose a new blockchain system design to improve engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies’ supply chain for constructing oil and gas infrastructure, by mitigating cost and time inefficiencies. Design/methodology/approach A case study analyses the supply chain of a sample EPC company. First, a literature review is conducted to explore the subject in academic literature. Second, information flows are mapped using responsible, accountable, consulted and informed analysis and cross-functional process mapping. Third, inefficiencies are identified. Fourth, the root causes of the inefficiencies are pinpointed using fishbone and five-times-why analysis. Fifth, a comparison is made between the linear and the blockchain information system via force-field analysis. Sixth, a specific blockchain system design is identified based on three external expert interviews. Finally, the new system is designed and a cost-benefit analysis is conducted. Findings Major cost and time inefficiencies in oil and gas infrastructure developments are caused by a poor information flow in the supply chain. The new blockchain system design is a feasible solution, reducing cost inefficiencies by 12.4% and operation lead-times by 36.5%. Research limitations/implications The confidentiality of the sample EPC company’s information represents a limitation. Originality/value The research introduces a new blockchain system design, reducing cost and time inefficiencies in the project-development supply chain, including implementation processes.
The Enterprise Global Risk Management (EGRM) framework views risk management as composed of four elements: hierarchical level of management, risk management policy, planned actions and orientation of the risk management process. It was proposed as the next step in the evolution of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and Enterprise Integrated Risk Management (EIRM) by including the risks of Industry 4.0. Blockchains are an essential and very fast-growing technology. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the EGRM framework, through the idea of including Industry 4.0 risks, could be used for decision making of risk management in organizations/enterprises that deploying blockchains. To achieve it, the quasi-multicriteria algorithm SIGMA is used for evaluation of optimal elements of the EGRM framework by different criteria for risk tolerance. It is proposed a reverse interpretation of the worst-case solutions as recommendation for preliminary guideline for risk management recourse allocation between these elements of EGRM. The presented results support the assumption that EGRM framework is applicable as an additional interpretive tool for risk management decision-making in blockchain deployment. The framework could be considered as promising tool for ex-ante guidelines for allocating resources (financial or other) of enterprises/organizations among the elements of the EGRM.
The emergence of a new pandemic, known as COVID-19, has touched various sections of the supply chain (SC). Since then, numerous studies have been conducted on the issue, but the need for a holistic review study that highlights the gaps and limits of previous research, as well as opportunities and agendas for future studies, is palpable. Through a systematic literature review on blockchain technology (BCT) deployment in supply-chain management (SCM) concerning the COVID-19 pandemic, this research seeks to add to the content of previous studies and to enlighten the path for future studies. Relevant papers were found using a variety of resources (Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and ProQuest). Seventy-two articles were systematically selected, considering the PRISMA procedure, and were thoroughly analyzed based on BCT, methodologies, industrial sectors, geographical, and sustainability context. According to our findings, there is a significant lack of empirical and quantitative methodologies in the literature. The majority of studies did not take specific industries into account. Furthermore, the articles focusing on the sustainability context are few, particularly regarding social and environmental issues. In addition, most of the reviewed papers did not consider the geographical context. The results indicate that the deployment of BCT in several sectors is not uniform, and this utilization is reliant on their services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the concentration of research on the impacts of the BCT on SCM differs according to the conditions of various countries in terms of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also show that there is a direct relationship between the deployment of BCT and sustainability factors, such as economic and waste issues, under the circumstances surrounding COVID-19. Finally, this study offers research opportunities and agendas to help academics and other stakeholders to gain a better knowledge of the present literature, recognize aspects that necessitate more exploration, and drive prospective studies.