Entities in modern supply chains are geographically dispersed across the globe. These entities have to collaborate to function as an integrated system. Advancements in technology facilitate various means for effectively sharing information among supply chain entities. At present, organizations are IT-enabled, and they use dedicated information systems to manage and share their information. In fact, the majority of such systems are technically centralized in nature. Centralized information systems are exposed to a set of security vulnerabilities, and they can cause trust issues in supply chains. Decentralized information sharing can serve several benefits to supply chains. Blockchain is an emerging database technology that facilitates decentralized information sharing. Blockchain-based decentralized information sharing can bring attractive benefits for supply chain stakeholders. This chapter narrates the importance of decentralized information sharing in supply chains and introduces blockchain technology and its opportunities in the stream of supply chain management.
Top1. Introduction
A supply chain is a group of organizations combinedly work to serve the customers with products or services, fulfilling their needs. Apart from organizations, supply chains are integrated with many individuals, various tasks, data, and other resources. The success of any supply chain relies on its effective management (Beamon, 1998; Lin et al., 2006; Mentzer et al., 2001). Supply chain management is a set of activities involved in various stages of supply chain operations, such as procurement, production, logistics, and distribution of goods and services (Stock & Boyer, 2009). Information sharing is critical in supply chain management because it allows stakeholders involved in the network to access the relevant information which they need to make informed decisions (Li, 2002; Lee & Whang, 2000). This includes information about inventory levels, sales, demand forecast, production schedules, shipping status, and so on. When this information is shared effectively, it can help to optimize the supply chain, minimize the costs, reduce the delivery delays, and increase customer satisfaction (Lotfi et al. 2013, Yu et al., 2001).
Modern supply chains are complex networks of globally disseminated organizations collaboratively functioning to serve the demand of end-customers. While globalization in business reformed the structure of supply chains into a complicated format, the drastic rise in the count of intermediaries started creating several issues (Sharma et al., 2013). Suppressing such issues, advancements in IT significantly supported the supply chains to constitute a strong base of communication among the entities (de Barros et al., 2015). Modern IT-enabled supply chains use dedicated information systems to manage the communication systematically. By definition, an information system is a systematized amalgamation of a set of resources dedicated for the storage, retrieval, transformation, and broadcasting of information in an organization (Al-Mamary, 2014). These resources include individuals, hardware and software, various data resources, communication networks, data resources, and pre-defined policies and procedures. A supply chain information system can be established in different forms, such as transaction processing systems, management information systems, expert systems, etc. (Gupta, 2013). Information systems assist supply chain stakeholders to effectively share relevant information enabling collaboration to improve supply chain performance.
It is a fact that IT-enabled information systems supplemented the operations in supply chains, but it paved novel forms of trust issues causing difficulties for supply chain stakeholders (Daneshvar Kakhki & Gargeya, 2019). The primary issue with traditional IT-enabled systems is their centralized architecture. Centralized systems adopted by the existing supply chains are not secure, and they are open to many problems, such as single point of failure, data manipulations, etc. (Zhang & Li, 2006). These types of issues cause the failure of supply chain systems, temporarily or permanently affecting internal and external communications. Communication issues can create severe implications in supply chain relationships (Imeri et al., 2019). In the backdrop of these points, any steps for reinforcing the reliability and quality of supply chain information systems are relevant.