ITECH7413 Research Report: How Blockchain Can Transform Supply Chain

This research report investigates how blockchain technology can transform supply chain activities, addressing the importance of blockchain and identifying supply chain activities prone to disruption. It uses a literature review and expert interviews to explore blockchain's benefits, including transparency, audit trails, increased security, efficiency, and cost reduction. The report also highlights the drawbacks of blockchain technology, such as the need to manage people and processes, confidence issues, data collection issues, network compatibility issues, and potential costs, privacy, legal, and security problems. Ultimately, the research concludes that blockchain offers significant benefits like traceability, efficiency, and cost reduction, while also acknowledging the limitations of the study, such as interviewing few experts and focusing on recent publications. Desklib provides access to similar reports and study resources.

HOW CAN BLOCK CHAIN TRANSFORM SUPPLY CHAIN?
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Executive
summary
The research explores how
block chain technology will
transform supply chain
activities. The research
questions include,
1.How important is block chain
technology to supply chain?
2.Which supply chain activities
are prone to disruption?

Introduction
 Block chain technology is the most disruptive technology in the
business world (Anand, 2019).
 The various changes include, bitcoins, smart contracts and smart
contracts.
 Block chain technology offers high security for data, which has
increased the rate of adoption to financial and supply chain activities.

Literature
 Block chain is a peer-to-peer distributed network with cryptographic
security and very difficult to change thus offering high security
(Hassani, 2018).
 Block chain exists in the form of encoded digital ledgers stored on
multiple computers connected to,
1. public networks
2. private networks.

Literature
Block chain technologies differ
in terms of accessibility
(Hassani, 2018).
Block chain technology
includes:
1. Public block chains.
2. Permissioned block chains.

Research methodology
 Literature review
 Most of the available publications on block chains were published within
the past five years since the topic is relatively new.
 The online sources include:
1. Science Direct
2. Google scholar
3. JSTOR

Literature
 Expert interview
 The research interviewed experts in the area of block chain technology
and supply chains.
 The experts had the following characteristics:
1. Involved in other research
2. Had adequate knowledge and worked in the supply chain or ICT

Research
findings
Transparency
Block chain allows the parties
involved in the movement of
products to use digital
footprints of products such as
(Siemsen, 2011).
1. GPS
2. RFID
The digital footprints show the
exact location of a product.

Proper audit trail
 Block chain offers an audit trail arising from visibility of product
movement along the supply chain network (Singh, 2019).
 The digital footprints show the various product movements while in
transit.

Increased security
 Block chain technology protects goods against,
1. Tampering
2. cybercrime
 Block chain ledgers offer very high security to stored data through
encryption and security protocols (Bell, 2015).

Efficiency and cost reduction
 Block chain technology has resulted in an improvement in logistics and
supply chain activities due to acceleration of the flow of data between
parties, which reduces time spent (Bell, 2015).
 Efficiency kicks in through the use of digital processes in transfer of
documents and data in cross border supply chain activities.

Summary of
findings
Visibility has a ripple effect of
introducing other benefits such
as optimization and autonomy
of procedures.
Permissioned block chain will
be a better option for supply
chain in dealing with data
leakage and privacy.
Block chain technology is still in
the infancy stage resulting in a
high skepticism towards
integration into supply chain
systems (Li, 2014).