Case Study: Blockchain's Role in Supply Chain Integrity and Efficiency

This case study explores the implementation of blockchain technology in supply chain management to address issues such as complexity, cyber-attacks, and information transfer security. The study highlights blockchain's potential to enhance supply chain integrity, improve tracking of goods, build trust, and streamline transactions. It discusses how blockchain can improve efficiency and facilitate global trade. The case also identifies challenges like the cost of implementation, the need for supplier adoption, technical knowledge requirements, and security concerns. It concludes by mentioning companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Walmart that are already using blockchain, emphasizing its nascent stage but promising future in transforming the supply chain landscape. The case study references works by Kshetri and Pan, Wang, and Xin.

RUNNING HEAD: LOGISTICS AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
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Logistics and Supply Chain Management

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Block Chain: A New Solution for Supply Integrity
1. The current issues with managing the supply chain are as follows: increasing level of
complexity because of global trade utilization, cyber-attacks to supply chain were
increasing, inability to protect information transfer in the process of supply chain.
Further, the supply chain integrity affected physical goods, and information transferred in
the process and becoming a serious issue that companies are facing in complex and ever
changing environment of the global supply chain industry (Pan, Wang and Xin, 1).
Hence, the issues faced in managing the supply chain are integrity of goods, trust and
obstacles in tracking transactions of goods.
These issues can be addressed through block chain technology. Block chain is a
mechanism that is used for record keeping that help businesses to work together with
reliability and authenticity. Block chain seen as technology behind bitcoins and traded on
online currency. Block chain plays an important role in changing supply chain
management. With this technology the above mentioned issues of supply chain can be
addressed. Block Chain can be used to track quantity and movement in supply chain. As
this technology can record the product origin along with each and every transactions that
leads to take the product to final destination (Pan, Wang, and Xin, 5). This solves the
issue of trust associated with the supply chain. With that reliability of data and
information can be maintained by using Block Chain. Further, with this technology
efficiency can be increased while eliminating inconsistency in the company’s supply
chain process. At last, issue of global trade liberalization can also be addressed as with
the help of bitcoins all the forms of assets are traded. It helps consumers to trade online
across the world within the block chain network.
2. The technology bring major changes in the supply chain management, supply chain
managers are focusing on creating a parallel infrastructure without hampering the
productivity but there are still challenges. The main issue is cost of installing blockchain
technology in supply chain management as it scared most large and medium organization
((Pan, Wang and Xin, 5). The biggest challenge with block chain technology is
convincing suppliers to adopt the technology and take advantage of transparent option.
Further, adopting block chain is a technological concept, this requires knowledge of

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technical structure, security protocols and data schemas. Another aspect that leads to a
challenging situation for companies to adopt block chain is security issues. One of the
challenges to block chain technology adoption in existing supply chain is lack of trust of
people on banking and financial transactions (Kshetri). Due to that organizations are
struggling to develop trust of people on digital assets. The lack of awareness about digital
assets and block chain leads to challenging situation for companies to implement block
chain technology in its supply chain network.
The companies that can benefit from adopting block chain technology are manufacturing,
food and beverage and logistics can implement block chain networks in their supply
chain application and ERP as requirement of doing business (Kshetri). Hence, it can be
said that block chain technology is still in infancy and big organizations like IBM,
Microsoft and Walmart are using block chain technology.

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References
Kshetri, Nir. "1 Blockchain’s roles in meeting key supply chain management
objectives." International Journal of Information Management 39 (2018): 80-89.
Pan, M., X. Wang, and X. Xu. "Blockchain: A New Solution for Supply Integrity." (2016).