OM Forum - Distributed Ledgers and Operations: What Operations Management Researchers Should Know About Blockchain Technology

By Volodymyr Babich, Gilles Hilary. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2020

692 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Problem definition: Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology. While it has grown in prominence, its full potential and possible downsides are not fully understood yet, especially with respect to operations management (OM). Academic/practical relevance: This article fills this gap. Methodology: After briefly reviewing the technical foundations, we explore multiple business and policy aspects. Results: We identify five key strengths, the corresponding five main weaknesses, and three research themes of applying blockchain technology to OM. The key strengths are (1) visibility, (2) aggregation, (3) validation, (4) automation, and (5) resiliency. The corresponding weaknesses are (1) lack of privacy, (2) lack of standardization, (3) garbage in, garbage out, (4) black box effect, and (5) inefficiency. The three research themes are (1) information, (2) automation, and (3) tokenization. Managerial implications: We illustrate these research themes with multiple promising research problems, ranging from classical inventory management, to new areas of ethical OM, and to questions of industrial organization.

Subfields: Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/480510dc9c3e5ced37f55d0a970ee453bcd81906

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Citations in the corpus

On the Financing Benefits of Supply Chain Transparency and Blockchain Adoption (2020, neutral): “Babich and Hilary (2018) provide a qualitative discussion of the technology’s potential to improve production and distribution networks and implications for operations management researchers.”
Supply chain finance: Historical foundations, current research, future developments (2019, background): “a digital backbone with IoT and increase visibility into the structure of extended supply chains (Biswas and Sen, 2016; Babich and Hilary, 2018).”
Blockchain Adoption for Combating Deceptive Counterfeits (2018, background): “There are several survey papers that present background and research opportunity for blockchain (e.g., Babich and Hilary 2020, Hastig and Sodhi 2020, Kumar et al. 2018, Olsen and Tomlin 2020).”
Blockchain adoption in operations and supply chain management: empirical evidence from an emerging economy (2020, background): “This leads to a need for trusting process integrity without necessarily understanding the whole technical features, and for relying on information sharing through supply chains, etc. (Babich and Hilary 2020).”
Analysis of resilience strategies and ripple effect in blockchain-coordinated supply chains: An agent-based simulation study (2020, background): “The most important influencing factors and features of blockchain are immutability, transparency (single source of truth), disintermediation, irreversibility, and the automation potential through smart contracts (Babich and Hilary, 2020; Pournader et al., 2020).”
Blockchain applications in supply chains, transport and logistics: a systematic review of the literature (2019, neutral): “…technology such as increased supply chain transparency, freight tracking, carrier onboarding and Mobility as a Service (Carter and Koh 2018; Babich and Hilary 2018; Casey and Wong 2017), this paper aims to contribute to these attempts by reviewing the latest academic debates, industry use…”
Combating Copycats in the Supply Chain with Permissioned Blockchain Technology (2021, positive): “Consumers trust PBT because the quality data are unique and cannot be modiﬁed or altered by an individual (Babich and Hilary 2020).”