Blockchain-enabled Information Sharing within a Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

A supply chain consists of many stakeholders such as suppliers, carriers and customers. It is often complex due to the rapid development of economic globalization and the intense competition pressure in the market which resulted in information sharing within a supply chain to be fragmented. Blockchain technology can solve this problem by having only a “one trusted ledger” that could reshape the element of data trust. The goal of this paper is to identify and understand the impact of blockchain technology for information sharing within a supply chain. The decentralized nature of blockchain technology offers a high level of transparency and has gained the attention from various sectors to deploy this technology. A systematic literature review in the academic literature was conducted using different databases. Blockchain-enabled information sharing can add value to enhance collaborative work in different types of supply chains such as health and medical, construction and smart city. From our findings, one potential impact of deploying blockchain-enabled information sharing within a supply chain is that it ensures all members in the chain can obtain verified information which enhances collaborative partnerships. Through this in-depth research, we highlighted potential barriers that could impede the development of blockchain technology in supply chain such as the lack of understanding of blockchain technology in businesses and conflict of interests. Future work such as information hiding, in parallel with information sharing, could close the gap in deploying this technology within a supply chain. Understanding the nature of different supply chain is also important to better prepare the deployment of blockchain. We acknowledge that our approach in selecting literatures in our systematic review may exclude certain literatures. Nonetheless, we tried to include as many relevant literatures as possible, to develop a roadmap on the current situation of blockchain-enabled information sharing within a supply chain.