Abstract
Background: Blockchain is a digitally managed, distributed, and decentralized ledger used to record transactions in an immutable format. Its characteristics in providing trust, transparency, and traceability make it attractive for applications where transactions are involved. Originally intended to support financial transactions, the technology has gained attention even in non-financial sectors such as health care, manufacturing, retail, and government services. Methods: For centuries, the various functions of manufacturing industries have worked based on the relationship and trust that they have with their upstream and downstream stakeholders. In addition, as the conventional factories are growing into giant gigafactories, the participation of several intermediaries further complicates the supply chain and logistics operations. Hence, the article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the role of blockchain technology in addressing supply chain and logistics-related challenges by analyzing, organizing, and reviewing the literature. Results: The study shows that blockchain technology can transform the supply chain and logistics into secure, agile, trusted, and transparent functions. A conceptualized application scenario demonstrates the benefits of blockchain technology in providing provenance and traceability to critical products. Conclusions: In particular, a private or permissioned blockchain is suitable for multi-organizational businesses such as supply chain and logistics. In addition, IoT-blockchain integration, smart contracts, and asset tracking has immense benefits in the future.
Highlights
The four major departments of the manufacturing industry are engineering, operations, information technology and finance, and sales and marketing
The current challenges in supply chain and logistics can be termed as the lack of trustworthy data and data visibility, which is primarily due to the participation of many intermediaries
As the scope of the paper is to explain the fundamentals of blockchain technology and how it can help in streamlining the manufacturing supply chain, only an overview of blockchain architecture is discussed
Summary
The four major departments of the manufacturing industry are engineering (research, design, and development), operations (production planning and control, manufacturing, quality control, maintenance, supply chain, logistics, packaging, and dispatch), information technology and finance (information technology, financial control, human relations, and administration), and sales and marketing. Many large-scale organizations have long ago moved from the conventional methods of tracking their products using physical ledgers, emails, and excel sheets to an IT-based technology infrastructure such as EDI and SAP (Enterprise Resource Planning systems), the real challenge in tackling the seamless flow of products and achieving the visibility of products at every stage is still unaddressed [3,4] As these technologies are centralized database management technologies, they are vulnerable to manipulation and security threats. The increase in the number of products and global supplier network has added several complex interlinked layers to the supply chain and lengthened logistics chain which means that there are multiple places where something can go wrong This made the industries realize the importance of further digitizing their supply chain and logistics facilities and the need to adopt emerging technologies such as blockchain to improve the integrity and visibility of data. The study would emphasize businesses to question their current practices and make them think about the integration of data-oriented transaction-driven technology such as blockchain into their supply chain
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