Blockchain in Logistics and Supply Chain: A Lean Approach for Designing Real-World Use Cases

By Guido Perboli, S. Musso, Mariangela Rosano. IEEE Access, 2018

447 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Blockchain technology can be defined as a distributed ledger database for recording transactions between parties verifiably and permanently. Blockchain emerged as a leading technology layer for financial applications. Nevertheless, in the past years, the attention of researchers and practitioners moved to the application of the Blockchain technologies to other domains. Recently, it represents the backbone of a new digital supply chain. Thanks to its capability of ensuring data immutability and public accessibility of data streams, Blockchain can increase the efficiency, reliability, and transparency of the overall supply chain, and optimize the inbound processes. The literature concerning Blockchain in non-financial applications mainly focused on the technological part and the Business Process Modeling, lacking in terms of standard methodology for designing a strategy to develop and validate the overall Blockchain solution and integrate it in the Business Strategy. Thus, this paper aims to overcome this lack. First, we integrate the current literature filling the lack concerning the digital strategy, creating a standard methodology to design Blockchain technology use cases, which are not related to finance applications. Second, we present the results of a use case in the fresh food delivery, showing the critical aspects of implementing a Blockchain solution. Moreover, the paper discusses how the Blockchain will help in reducing the logistics costs and in optimizing the operations and the research challenges.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6271bd9f60d153564d3e5f01962249475ec3618e

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Citations in the corpus

A literature review of blockchain technology applications in supply chains: A comprehensive analysis of themes, methodologies and industries (2021, unknown): “…the analysis of 13 case studies in the “Application” category, it is found that most cases are concerned with the implementation of blockchain projects of some large enterprises, such as Wal-Mart, IBM and Maersk, and only two of them focus on SMEs (Y. L. Chang et al., 2020; Perboli et al., 2018).”
Blockchain for Industry 4.0: A Comprehensive Review (2020, background): “[62] suggested that the blockchain improves the reliability, efficiency, and transparency of supply-chain, and speedup inbound processes.”
Leveraging the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management (2019, background): “…in IoT devices and networks, such as unique device identiﬁcation and trust management between di ﬀ erent devices, data and information provenance tracking (to the authoritative source versus custodian sources), authentication and access control, and accountability in IoT-based applications [102].”
When Blockchain Meets Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review on Current Development and Potential Applications (2020, background): “design [48]–[50], and a combination of other emerging technologies.”