Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Management: A Challenge Yet an Opportunity to Gauge

Introduction

Supply chain (SC) refers to an integrated system of interrelated business processes for acquiring raw materials, transforming these materials into finished products, adding value to finished products, distributing and promoting products to retailers or end consumers, and facilitating the exchange of information among business entities. In short, the supply chain represents a backward flow of information and a forward flow of goods (Min & Zhou, 2002). Over the years, this simple supply chain process has evolved into a discipline named supply chain management (SCM). SCM is accredited to unite the concepts of operations, distribution, and procurement into a network of links and nodes (Carter et al., 2015). SCM addresses the inherently unstable nature of the supply chain by minimizing the associated uncertainties and risks (Stevens & Johnson, 2016). In modern times, however, the scope of the supply chain has broadened due to its inseparable connection with environmental concerns (Zimon et al., 2020).

As of today, 6.66 million tons of toxic chemicals are released into the environment with annual 24.88 billion tons of CO₂ emission and 3.54 million hectares of forest loss (Worldometer, 2023). These statistics paint severe environmental damages owing to the 0.88% annual growth in the world’s population that demands more resource consumption with severe environmental impacts (Macrotrends, 2023). Addressing these environmental concerns, back in 2015, the United Nations (UN) initiated a 15-year plan comprising 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) enlisting 169 SDG targets to be tracked across 232 unique indicators (United Nations, 2020). The 2030 SDG agenda focuses on peace and prosperity for the planet, people, and their properties. The adoption of a sustainability agenda is gradually becoming pervasive within business enterprises that aim to achieve human well-being and higher levels of sustainability (Agrawal et al., 2022). As a result, green supply chain (GSC) and sustainable supply chain (SSC) are emerging as significant concepts for business operations (Cai & Choi, 2020).

The sustainable supply chain is a new domain that simultaneously addresses the modern world's needs for efficiency and natural resource preservation while enabling enterprises to achieve a competitive edge through innovation and waste reduction (Zimon et al., 2020). Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) bridges the supply chain with performance goals that address the current and future generation needs by implementing socially and environmentally focused solutions. These SDG-enabled SCM practices, however, were put to a halt when the global economies had a pandemic outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Global supply chains were challenged to meet large-scale product demands due to poor visibility, resilience, and flexibility (Kayikci et al., 2021). The unavoidable environmental risks such as the pandemic together with internal risks such as delivery delays, data loss, and equipment malfunction made supply chain practices vulnerable to major disruptions with frequent occurrences (Marinagi et al., 2023). In response, academic researchers and practitioners coined terms such as SC 4.0, smart supply chain, and resilient SC 4.0 to emphasize the application of industrial revolution (IR 4.0) technologies to digitalize different functions of supply chain (Groschopf et al., 2021; Marinagi et al., 2023; Nayeri et al., 2023; Xu et al., 2021).