Abstract
With the realization of environmental and social sustainability in developing and using apparel products and services, stakeholders – particularly consumers- are more concerned regarding these issues in business operations. In order to address new developments and changing trends, apparel businesses are compelled to identify and implement innovative and sustainable solutions for regular activities. This chapter assesses how the textile and apparel supply chains can comply with the United Nations' sustainable development goals. In particular, verifying the source of raw materials and maintaining visibility of merchandise products and related services while moving through the value-chain networks is challenging and maintains interoperable business sustainability. Information systems play a vital role in maintaining operational sustainability. This chapter presents a blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure powered by service-oriented computing architecture as a solution for information processing for maintaining sustainable supply chain operations.
TopIntroduction
In recent decades, supply chain operations have observed a few exclusive trends, such as the globalization of product manufacturing and service offerings, optimized product life cycles, digitalization business processes, and multifaceted customer experiences, leading to the evolution of highly complicated supply chains. Incorporating social and environmental responsibility-related issues in regular business operations is becoming increasingly essential to companies' and supply chains' success (Choi et al., 2019). Companies are responsible for their activities affecting their businesses' environment, society, economy, and supply chains business partners. The United Nations' new sustainable development goals for 2030 have come into force since 2016, which initiated seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs, 2023). The SDGs will demonstrate the new objectives of economic, social, and environmental developments, such as ending poverty, economic growth, and environmental protection are the few important ones. As a result, sustainability within the operations of organizations and the supply chain has become a contemporary issue and an essential agenda of research communities. The use of sustainability business operational practices not only enhances the environmental and social performance of companies and their supply chains but also provides an opportunity for businesses to acquire a new set of competencies, which can help them get a competitive advantage by deploying sustainability initiatives within and outside of the organizational boundaries (e.g., business partners operations).
In this way, supply chain sustainability is a central theme of most business organizations. The main objective of sustainable supply chains is to create and maintain long-term economic, social, and environmental value for all stakeholders involved in delivering products and services to specific markets. Consequently, all businesses today appreciate the value of supply chain management (SCM) and sound operational practices, and the advantages of digitization of its business processes have become a popular topic in both sustainable commercial operations and academic research purposes (Pal, 2019). Research has shown that sustainability has become necessary for businesses considering social and environmental issues in their strategies. It is also essential that businesses and their supply chains accelerate the shift from focus to sustainability and use technologies to digitalize business processes (Pal, 2019). In addition, business organizations are already making significant investments in digital supply chains because they recognize that digitalization will give them five big prizes: integration, transparency, productivity, sustainability, and, ultimately, the opportunity to transform their supply chain operating model.
Moreover, sustainability is essential for accessing global markets and accomplishing high profits (Pal, 2021). For example, while sustainable shipment management was considered a cost in the past, now, thanks to modern technologies (e.g., IoT, radio frequency identification, blockchain, and cloud computing), it is possible to guarantee sustainable logistics. Indeed, using these emerging technologies, improving carbon emissions-related issues and saving resources is possible. One of the most critical requirements for sustainable supply chain management demands the transparency of information and appropriate communication mechanisms between the supply chain business stakeholders. In order to earn these goals, it is essential to have adequate information and communication technology (ICT) standards that ensure the reliability of information systems architectures and foolproof security of operational data.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Supply Chain Management: A supply chain consists of a network of key business processes and facilities, involving end-users and suppliers that provide products, services, and information. In this chain management, improving the efficiency of the overall chain is an influential factor; and it needs at least four important strategic issues to be considered: supply chain network design, capacity planning, risk assessment and management, and performances monitoring and measurement.
Immutability: This term refers to the fact that blockchain transactions cannot be deleted or altered.
Blockchain: In simple, a blockchain is just a data structure that can be shared by different users using computing data communication network (e.g., peer-to-peer or P2P). Blockchain is a distributed data structure comprising a chain of blocks. It can act as a global ledger that maintains records of all transactions on a blockchain network. The transactions are time-stamped and bundled into blocks where each block is identified by its cryptographic hash .
Provenance: In a blockchain ledger, provenance is a way to trace the origin of every transaction such that there is no dispute about the origin and sequence of the transactions in the ledger.
Decentralized Computing Infrastructure: These computing infrastructures feature computing nodes that can make independent processing and computational decisions irrespective of what other peer computing nodes may decide.
Cryptography: Blockchain’s transactions achieve validity, trust, and finality based on cryptographic proofs and underlying mathematical computations between various trading partners.
Internet of Things (IoT): The Internet of Things (IoT), also called the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet, is now a technology paradigm envisioned as a global network of machines and devices capable of interacting with each other. The IoT is recognized as one of the most critical areas of future technology and is gaining vast attention from a wide range of industries.
Block: A block is a data structure used to communicate incremental changes to the local state of a node. It consists of a list of transactions, a reference to a previous block and a nonce.
Warehouse: A warehouse can also be called a storage area, and it is a commercial building where raw materials or goods are stored by suppliers, exporters, manufacturers, or wholesalers, they are constructed and equipped with tools according to special standards depending on the purpose of their use.