When Blockchain Meets Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review on Current Development and Potential Applications

Abstract

This study aims to explore the current status, potential applications, and future directions of blockchain technology in supply chain management. A literature survey, along with an analytical review, of blockchain-based supply chain research was conducted to better understand the trajectory of related research and shed light on the benefits, issues, and challenges in the blockchain-supply-chain paradigm. A selected corpus comprising 106 review articles was analyzed to provide an overview of the use of blockchain and smart contracts in supply chain management. The diverse industrial applications of these technologies in various sectors have increasingly received attention by researchers, engineers, and practitioners. Four major issues: traceability and transparency, stakeholder involvement and collaboration, supply chain integration and digitalization, and common frameworks on blockchain-based platforms, are critical for future orientation. Traditional supply chain activities involve several intermediaries, trust, and performance issues. The potential of blockchain can be leveraged to disrupt supply chain operations for better performance, distributed governance, and process automation. This study contributes to the comprehension of blockchain applications in supply chain management and provides a blueprint for these applications from the perspective of literature analysis. Future efforts regarding technical adoption/diffusion, block-supply chain integration, and their social impacts were highlighted to enrich the research scope.