A New Panacea for Supply Chains?: Experience Feedback From Blockchain Technology Adopters

Introduction

Shift towards digitalization of business practices can be witnessed in nearly every industry nowadays. Fast paced global trade reveals the current supply chains (SCs) complications, such as lack of reliable data, shortage of raw materials, transportation difficulties, increased lead times and orders delays. Today consumers are setting importance not only to the availability of a product, but also to its quality, where provenance of a product can impact on the consumption decision (Hay et al., 2021). In order to meet the expectations and needs of their consumers, SC participants need to be mutually motivated and open to collaborate to reach a common objective. Here, another angle of supply chain management (SCM) resistance arises: parties are seeking for a higher dedication and openness to designate mutual dependency, as the trust level between parties impacts on their willingness to collaborate with each other (Han et al., 2021).

Various innovative technological solutions are arising for businesses, one of the most promising technologies today is blockchain technology (BCT). Blockchain can be characterized as a “digital, decentralized and distributed ledger in which transactions are logged and added in chronological order with the goal of creating permanent and tamper-proof records” (Treiblmaier, 2018, p.547). When applied to a business context, BCT is disrupting the current processes with its native immutable nature – information and transactions throughout the SC processes cannot be altered or removed later due to the architecture of technology, that links the blocks together (Sunny et al., 2020). Like that, BCT is claimed to bring product provenance (Montecchi et al., 2019), ensure transparency and traceability (Centobelli et al., 2021), enable trust with end-consumer, by allowing end-consumers to check the product origins (Shahid et al., 2020), as well as promote mutual trust between SC parties by protecting shared data (Al-Rakhami & Al-Mashari, 2021).

Extant literature reveals academic interest in disruptive technology solutions for global SCs. Currently there are various studies with literature systematization of BCT use in SCs (Queiroz et al., 2019; Pournader et al., 2020; Wan et al., 2020; Reddy et al., 2021). Theoretical discussions of BCT applications and their potential results for specific industries, such as oil (Vishnubhotla et al. 2020), pharmaceutical products (Bamakan et al., 2021; Musamih et al., 2021), food (Kamilaris et al., 2019; Menon and Jain, 2021), luxury goods (Choi, 2019; Berneis & Winkler, 2021) and other industries. The nascent stage of BCT adoption makes it challenging for academic research to find real use-cases for exploration and adoption results discussion. Thus, the gap remains to bring the real application results and experiences of BCT adoption pioneers to academic literature.

The purpose of this study is to explore the benefits, challenges and real experiences from BCT adoption in SCM, based on feedback collected from early industry pioneers. Thus, the goal of this study is to reveal the potential of the BCT adoption to enhance SC operations and create a base for decision-making process for suitability assessment of the BCT as a solution to a specific SC case.

To address the purpose of this study, qualitative research was conducted and the BCT adoption to SC activities was investigated through semi-structured interviews with representatives of pioneering companies. Semi-structured approach allowed gaining real opinions of the BCT adoption experience in SC practices. In the next sections the findings from the real industry pilots and applications of BCT will be revealed to shed light on intentions for the technology adoption, feasible improvements and remaining challenges in the context of SCM.