Traditional Supply Chain Research Articles

Blok Zincir Uygulamaları ile Kapalı Döngü Tedarik Zincirinde Bilgi Yönetiminin Değeri

Purpose: Rapidly developing information technology increases expectations for obtaining much more efficient structures by providing accurate, sufficient and secure information sharing in supply chains as well as in many other fields. Traceability is a critical element in supply chain management, especially in security-sensitive sectors such as food, medicine, etc. Blockchain is a decentralized record platform that provides traceability, transparency and security, and it shows promise in alleviating traditional supply chain management problems and making a positive contribution. This article aims to improve the relevant literature by revealing the level of impact of blockchain technology on supply chain management.Methodology: First of all, a traditional closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) network was designed and modeled. Then, the main model was developed by creating four more scenarios for different applications of the blockchain technology to the existing model and the application results were analyzed.Findings: This paper demonstrated the implementation of blockchain technology in forward and reverse flows activities coordination for effective and efficient supply chain management, and the resulting gains by developing appropriate models through explanatory scenarios. The implications showed that blockchain technology could significantly reduce supply chain costs.Originality: While blockchain technology is gaining attention, there are very few studies focused on its integration into the supply chain. Apart from the applications in the field of finance, the most important contribution and originality of the study is the application of the blockchain to CLSC from different aspects as partial, full, only forward flow and only reverse flow.

The configuration and evolution of Korean automotive supply network: an empirical study based on k-core network analysis

This study identified the hierarchical structure of the k-core network and examined how it changed over time by structurally analyzing the Korean automotive supply network. The k-core method is a useful subgroup analysis for identifying key nodes through a pruning process in a large and complex network such as the automotive industry. We used the information of 234 automotive parts suppliers listed in the “Automotive Industry Guide”. The supply network is divided into four subgroups, where at the center is the 4-core group with key nodes, surrounded by the next key group of the 3-core group. Around the 3-core group is the 2-core group, and at the periphery of the network is the 1-core group. Unlike in the traditional supply chain structure, all core groups include 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tier suppliers. In addition, it is confirmed that the k-core structure has a complementary relationship with the tier structure and degree centrality, and considering the three together, the key node could be identified in the network. Finally, an analysis of the evolution of the network revealed that most new suppliers entered the 1-core group, and those in the top k-core group had a higher remaining ratio. The significance of this study is 1) by presenting k-core, a new method to analyze the network structure, 2) confirming the structure and evolution of the actual supply network from a macroscopic perspective, and 3) identifying key suppliers that can directly or indirectly affect the company's performance.

A Financial Management Platform Based on the Integration of Blockchain and Supply Chain.

Internet of Things (IoT) finance extends financial services to the whole physical commodity society with the help of IoT technology to realize financial automation and intelligence. However, the security of IoT finance still needs to be improved. Blockchain has the characteristics of decentralization, immutability, faster settlement, etc., and has been gradually applied to the field of IoT finance. Blockchain is also considered to be an effective way to resolve the problems of the traditional supply chain finance industry, such as the inability to transmit core enterprise credit, the failure of full-chain business information connections and the difficulty of clearing and settlement. Supply chain finance allows the strongest enterprise in the supply chain to apply for credit guarantee from the bank to obtain bank loans, and use the funds for circulation in the supply chain to ensure that each enterprise in the whole supply chain can obtain working capital to realize profits, so as to maximize common interests. In this paper, a financial management platform based on the integration of blockchain and supply chain has been designed and implemented. Blockchain is used to integrate supply chain finance to synchronize the bank account payment system, realize the automatic flow of funds, process supervision and automatically settle account periods based on smart contracts. The four functional modules of the system are designed using unified modeling language (UML), and the model view controller (MVC) architecture is selected as the main architecture of the system. The results of the system test show that the proposed platform can effectively improve the system security, and can use the information in the blockchain to provide multi-level financing services for enterprises in supply chain finance.

Can “ugly veg” supply chains reduce food loss?

The tradition of marketing only aesthetically agreeable produce by retailers contributes to a major source of food loss through “ugly veg”, i.e., the produce that does not look “regular”. In this paper, we examine the relations between different tiers of agri-food supply chains to study the impact of marketing ugly veg on different supply chain members and the food loss in the system. We examine and compare scenarios of a centralized supply chain, a traditional supply chain without ugly veg, an ugly veg supply chain with a single retailer offering both regular produce and ugly veg, and a two-retailer supply chain where an auxiliary retailer sells the ugly veg. We characterize the equilibrium decisions in these systems and also provide analytical results and insights on the effectiveness of different supply chain designs based on a comprehensive numerical study. We demonstrate the conditions under which the supply chain can reduce overall food loss. For sufficiently high cost of effort, selling ugly veg through the single retailer reduces food loss. Nonetheless, the grower is generally better off offering the ugly veg to an auxiliary retailer. We show that the ratio of food loss per cultivated land always decreases in the two-retailer supply chain, while the total food loss might increase for sufficiently high cost of effort.

Block-A-City: An Agricultural Application Framework Using Blockchain for Next-Generation Smart Cities

Conventional lifestyles and working methods are motivated by rising trends and new technologies to form smart cities. Distributed chains are growing to computerize with a highly complicated framework. It is becoming an essential source of additional advantages in today's digital and smart city. Customers or users of smart cities are highly concerned about the quality of food and farm products. On the other hand, tracking the source information is challenging and, preserving its provenance throughout the supply chain network. Traditional supply chain networks are centralized, where a third party does the trading. These centralized systems lack of quality transparency and distribution accountability. Therefore, we provide a promising approach with a unique strategy for converting conventional agriculture to smart agriculture, concerning smart cities, considering blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) features. The blockchain technique is responsible for maintaining the immutability of the existing network. Still, it faces problems resolving fundamental issues in the distribution chain, like the trustworthiness of the different involved members, transaction responsibility, and real-time tracking. As a result, a trustworthy organization with traceability, conviction, confirmed transportation, and transparent mechanisms in the e-farm supply chain is proposed. Ethereum is used to deploy the proposed smart contract. Testing with the Hyperledger caliper measuring tool shows performance evaluation of several factors such as latency, throughput, resource consumption transaction per second, and so on are assessed. The findings support the effectiveness of the recommended strategy.

Dynamic blockchain adoption for freshness-keeping in the fresh agricultural product supply chain

During COVID-19, the explosive growth of demand for fresh agricultural products on E-commerce platform has increased the difficulty of maintaining the greenness and freshness in delivery. The traditional cold chain delivery is effective in keeping greenness, but its information asymmetry makes the freshness-keeping activities unable to be regulated, which may lead to the supply chain members giving up their freshness-keeping efforts. Can the blockchain technology effectively solve these problems? We consider a fresh agricultural product supply chain consisting of a supplier and an E-commerce platform (retailer). The retailer is responsible for the wholesale and sales of fresh agricultural products, and determines the blockchain adoption degree and advertising effort. The supplier is responsible for delivering fresh agricultural products to consumers, and determines the greenness investment and freshness-keeping effort. Based on the traditional and blockchain-based fresh agricultural product supply chain, we discuss the dynamic optimization of freshness-keeping effort, advertising effort, and blockchain adoption degree. Results show that the supplier will give up the freshness-keeping effort after receiving the wholesale funds in the traditional fresh agricultural product supply chain, which will naturally worsen the fresh agricultural products. When adopting blockchain technology, the supplier continues to make the freshness-keeping effort in delivery. And five specific settings are proved that blockchain is effective in maintaining freshness. But two other specific settings are determined that it is not suited for adopting blockchain. In addition, compared with the traditional fresh agricultural product supply chain, blockchain adoption can effectively reduce the freshness-keeping effort, advertising investment and goodwill for achieving the same profit margin level, and will not affect the greenness investment decision of the supplier. Our research can provide some insights into the cold chain logistics management of fresh blockchain.

Environmental and Economical Impact of Blockchain

Traditional food supply chains are centralised and have problems with variable product quality, missing data, and irregular product production. As seen by the countless cases of food fraud and adulteration that are reported on a daily basis from various parts of India, an improved decentralised supply chain model is urgently needed. India is a developing nation whose demographic dividend is its greatest advantage; it cannot afford to eat contaminated dairy products. We suggest a blockchain-enabled dairy supply chain platform for the sector as a result of this predicament. Blockchain is a technology that is starting to be widely employed in a variety of commercial areas. Traditional supply chains can be turned into decentralised, robust, transparent, impermeable networks with the use of blockchain technology. The suggested supply chain platform intends to increase food safety, maintain the nutritional value of dairy products, identify adulteration and contamination in dairy products, and stop the creation of fake dairy products. This platform offers more than just food traceability. The suggested platform for the dairy supply chain integrates smart contracts, and blockchain technology and has a positive effect on the environment.

Assessing smallholder farmers' perception of value creation and appropriation in sustainable production

Market opportunities and improved demands for sustainable production and consumption highlight the importance of engaging smallholder farmers. This study aims to understand the transition towards sustainability through the perception about the value created and appropriated of small poultry farmers who supply a company that practices Nature Farming, in a vertical integration system. The authors adopted a system of indicators (Ambitec-Agro, assessment of the impact of technological innovations in agriculture) and used content analysis software (ATLAS.ti) to assess farmers' perceptions. The results suggest that the transition to sustainable production creates capacities to add value, mainly from social and economic perspectives. In addition, the relational value has a strong influence on this dynamic. The study contributes by proposing an application of methodology based on mixed methods to identify the perceptions of smallholder farmers about created and appropriated value in migrating from an input-intensive production to a sustainable system, offering opportunities for improvement in traditional supply chains.

Integrating Blockchain in Various Organizational Models Pave the Path to Sustainable Development Goals

Blockchain is considered one of the most significant technological advances integrated into the Business Process Management (BPM) systems of various organizations over the past decade. The introduction of blockchain technologies is changing the way traditional supply chains are managed. In this sense, blockchain technologies have the potential to revolutionize complex supply chains in stability, traceability, and accountability. Since Blockchain technology has fostered the development of trust between many different parties, not just leaders and followers, it is assumed that Blockchain will give its adapters revolutionary characteristics. Upon a systematic bibliometric review that determined the impact of introducing Blockchain technology into the BPM, on the basis of previous research and scientific papers published in academic journals, it was found that most of the studies highlight the significance of Blockchain and its impact on the supply chain and financial sectors. However, this article aims to identify new characteristics of Blockchain’s impact on the BPM in various other sectors, especially in the telecommunications, non-governmental organizations, industrial, and banking sectors. The statistical analysis of the collected data examines the intermediate variables of the introduction of Blockchain technology (trust, immutability, transparency, and cost reduction) and its impact on increasing sustainability (economic, ecological, and social resilience) as a dependent variable. As a result of the study, the authors concluded that Blockchain has the potential to enhance the revolutionary characteristics of trust, immutability, cost reduction, and reliability in a business process model, accelerating the path to achieving sustainable development.

Strengthening Millet Value Chain through Farmer Producer Organizations

Millets are a group of small-seeded “Nutri-Cereals” that are grown as food crops in many parts of the world and is need of hour for achieving nutritional security. In the traditional supply chain, millet farmers were not getting remunerative prices but being the members in Farmers’ Producer Organizations, the share in the consumer rupee was increased. The value chain approach was used for analyzing the supply chain aspects of millets to strengthen the linkages, increase efficiency, competitiveness, and profitability. The study was conducted during 2022-23 with ICAR-IIMR promoting FPOs. The establishment of a primary processing unit by ICAR-IIMR at the FPO farm gate through the FPO strengthened the millet value chain by engaging FPOs/SHGs/rural women/unemployed youth in preparing value-added products and delivering them through the GeM portal, ONDC, FPO Bazar, and e-commerce platforms. To meet the millet value chain challenges overall adoption of improved technologies, better market linkages, and increased investment in infrastructure were the key strategies. Primary processing, value-added technology adoption by FPOs and declaring minimum support price by the state government, and creating facilities to procure at MSP by establishing millet food parks, millet shakti cafes, and millet bazar were found key sources to generate better income.

Improving the distribution of covid-19 vaccines using the blockchain technology: the Italian case study

Vaccination is one of the most effective ways to prevent and control the outbreak of infectious diseases. The vaccine supply chain differs from the traditional supply chains because of the perishability of the products, which need strict transport and warehousing conditions to guarantee the health and safety of people. In addition, in case of pandemics, the big amount of doses requested for the implementation of a mass vaccination campaign forces governments to design a proper logistic network and plan a rapid and efficient distribution of vaccines. This paper studies the organization of allocation and distribution of the covid-19 vaccines in Italy. The main criticalities in managing the vaccine supply chain have been identified and, because of its peculiarities, the blockchain has been considered a suitable technology to solve them. A simulation model has been developed to reproduce the current distribution of vaccines in Italy, and a future scenario with blockchain has been studied. The findings show that it is possible to improve the performance of the vaccine supply chain and make it more resilient by implementing the blockchain technology.

Rice Value Chain Analysis: Rice Seed Production as a Profitable Agribusiness in Nueva Ecija

This study explored the rice value chain (RVC) in Nueva Ecija, value additions, found restrictions, and offered to upgrade solutions to improve the competitiveness of the rice industry and specific segments in the RVC using the value chain analysis (VCA) methodology. Farmers, paddy dealers, millers, wholesalers, wholesaler-retailers, and retailers in Nueva Ecija provided primary data. Workshops with stakeholders were also held to validate preliminary findings and identify upgrading strategies. The RVC begins with the provision of inputs for paddy production and concludes with the consumption of milled rice. The RVC is dominated by a traditional multi-layered supply chain with interconnected chain actors consisting of competing farmers, paddy traders, millers, and rice traders in each segment and, frequently, with the involvement of brokers in both paddy aggregation and rice distribution, thereby increasing marketing cost. The major constraints identified in the RVC included high production and marketing costs of paddy and rice due to low yield, high labor and material inputs, and a lack of critical infrastructure and market facilities (e.g., modern mills, dryers, cheap transport, and energy), resulting in high domestic paddy and rice prices and low competitiveness of the entire rice VC. To improve competitiveness, the rice industry should focus on developing and promoting yield-increasing, postharvest loss-reducing, and cost-cutting technologies, as well as those that improve overall RVC efficiency, such as investments in enabling infrastructure and facilities for transport, handling, storage, drying, and milling.

The Geopolitical Dependence of Hydrogen

Climate change is increasingly causing drastic consequences for humanity both economically and environmentally. Facing these challenges, the world is looking for many alternative solutions in the field of energy, among others. One such solution is hydrogen. The article analyses the geopolitical aspects of hydrogen trade in the context of the global energy transition. Water, an essential component of hydrogen, has become a key element in the drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the search for alternative, sustainable energy sources. The dynamic growth of the hydrogen sector is leading to new centers of geopolitical influence and changing traditional commodity supply chains. Forecasts for future hydrogen trade suggest an increase in the importance of renewable energy sources at the expense of traditional raw materials, which could shape new national and international strategies. The development of energy infrastructure related to the production and distribution of green hydrogen plays a key role. Analysing the map of global hydrogen trade, which indicates an increasing interest in this element as a clean energy source, we can see the growing role of this raw material in the global economy and its potential to revolutionize national and international energy strategies. In conclusion, the article shows that the geopolitical aspects of the hydrogen trade have the potential to significantly affect global politics, economics and energy distribution in the coming years, highlighting the need for appropriate action at the national and international levels. Key words: hydrogen, energy transformation, supply chain, hydrogen production

Internet of Things Impact on Supply Chain Management

Traditional supply chains deal with uncertainty, cost, complexity, and vulnerability problems. In order to overcome these problems, supply chain operations need to be innovative in business process management. Establishing a large-scale smart infrastructure to merge data, information, products, physical objects, and all supply chain processes needs to automate intelligently in supply chain management (SCM) through building secure operational decision support systems. Information technology (IT) and information and communication technology (ICT) are essential in business process automation. In recent decades, Internet of things (IoT) applications have played an essential role in automating supply chain management's regular business processes and their operations-related decisions. The vast adoption of wireless sensor networks (WANs) with IoT technology provides access to sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. This way, the IoT provides access to a vast amount of data gathering by the WSNs, over the wide-area data communication networks. For example, sensing enterprise (SE) is an attribute of an enterprise or a network that allows it to react to business stimuli originating on the IoT-based infrastructure. This paper reviews some of the essential characteristics of IoT technology for designing SEs in supply chain management.

Green supply chain transformation and emission reduction based on machine learning.

Artificial intelligence techniques provide more possibilities for supply chain transformations in the face of global warming and environmental degradation. This study examines the Cournot game model of two competing supply chains with various carbon emission technologies as well as the possibility of upgrading machine learning technology. The investment risk of a supply chain's technology upgrade is either symmetric or asymmetric information. In the case of symmetric information, results show that the machine learning technology upgrade risk does not affect the market equilibrium outcomes of the duopoly model. However, in the case of asymmetric information, technology upgrade risk is vital in determining the quantities and prices of competition equilibrium. To achieve the goal of green supply chain transformation, the government should provide more technology and financial support to traditional supply chains to upgrade their machine learning technology on carbon emissions.

ПРОДОВОЛЬЧА СИСТЕМА: СУТНІСТЬ ТА ЗАХОДИ ЩОДО ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ ЇЇ СТІЙКОСТІ НА РІВНІ ГРОМАДИ

The article considers the essence of the food system, as a system of interconnected elements that interact in a certain way with the external environment and with each other and aim to provide people with food products. Food system issues include the governance and economics of food production, its sustainability, the extent to which we waste food, how food production affects the natural environment and the impact of food on human and population health. The full-scale aggression of the Russian Federation forced a different approach to the formation of food security in the country, its regions and communities. The impossibility of cultivating a large part of agricultural land, interrupted traditional supply chains, rising prices of products, changes in the population of communities, and therefore in food needs, the impact of blackouts on production enterprises, the destruction of processing and storage infrastructure exacerbated the issue of sustainable food supply. The issue of ensuring the sustainable functioning of the food system in the conditions of the challenges of wartime is becoming more and more relevant in the national system of sustainability, which aims to guarantee the safety and continuity of the functioning of the main spheres of life of society and the state before, during and after the onset of a crisis situation. The main measures to ensure the sustainability of the food system of communities have been formed, in particular: ensuring the efficiency of the functioning of producers of agricultural products that carry out their activities on community lands, creating a system of primary and advanced processing of agricultural products capable of satisfying the demand of the community in the form of ready-made food products or semi-finished products, ensuring an effective storage system for agricultural products, ready-made food products and semi-finished products, ensuring an uninterrupted system of supplying food products to the population, personnel support for agricultural production.

Construction of Supply Chain Security Management Model for Information and Communication Technology Based on the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing

At the level of enterprise supply chain security management, with the rise of network technology big data technology methods such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, it has had a multi-level impact on its supply chain management mode, including operation mode, operation mode, and security management mode. The traditional supply chain management model is based on old-fashioned communication methods and manual intervention for judgment and processing. Information and communication technology has advantages such as immediacy and strong correlation. Based on this, this article applies the data interconnection technology of the Internet of Things to the construction of supply chain management models and combines it with efficient algorithms of cloud computing. This article also explores the construction of supply chain security management models from the perspectives of participants, activity modes, module operations, and conducts data comparisons based on them. The experimental results show that in the running tests of the model, its average accuracy is about 89.60%, and the prediction accuracy of benefits is as high as 98.48%. In stability testing, it is also evident that the average stability of the model after multiple iterations is about 96.02%. Research has shown that the Internet of Things and cloud computing technology have great application potential in the construction of supply chain security management, which can provide enterprises with more effective supply chain security management tools.

Digital Business Ecosystems: Organizational Model, Roles, and Governance Towards Flexibility

Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) enable digital platforms to support companies’ collaboration in shared markets. This novel organization form facilitates and accelerates exchanges, which modifies B2B relationships. The main question is how to enable flexibility of these relationships when data sharing needs to expand the traditional supply chain roles of “supplier” and “customer”? To answer this question, we conducted several interviews to collect data from the French banking industry to build a future organizational model of DBE detailing the extended roles and rules of cooperation. These roles imply reciprocal data sharing from customers to suppliers in exchange for incentives or remuneration. Firstly, we propose a high-level organizational model of DBE, including the list of functions, actors, and requirements. Secondly, we conceptualize the DBE participant as an actor being both a customer and supplier simultaneously. Third, we propose a matrix to enable governance for digital business ecosystems. We contribute to flexible systems management by building a high-level organizational model detailing the roles and governance rules. We believe this model will support the fair distribution of resources, respect common and individual goals, and attain more sustainability with a concentration on the core processes of actors.

Research on Supply Chain Financial Risk Prevention Based on Machine Learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) proves decisive in today's rapidly developing society and is a motive force for the evolution of financial technology. As a subdivision of artificial intelligence research, machine learning (ML) algorithm is extensively used in all aspects of the daily operation and development of the supply chain. Using data mining, deductive reasoning, and other characteristics of machine learning algorithms can effectively help decision-makers of enterprises to make more scientific and reasonable decisions by using the existing financial index data. At present, globalization uncertainties such as COVID-19 are intensifying, and supply chain enterprises are facing bankruptcy risk. In the operation process, practical tools are needed to identify and opportunely respond to the threat in the supply chain operation promptly, predict the probability of business failure of enterprises, and take scientific and feasible measures to prevent a financial crisis in good season. Artificial intelligence decision-making technology can help traditional supply chains to transform into intelligent supply chains, realize smart management, and promote supply chain transformation and upgrading. By applying machine learning algorithms, the supply chain can not only identify potential risks in time and adopt scientific and feasible measures to deal with the crisis but also strengthen the connection and cooperation between different enterprises with the advantage of advanced technology to provide overall operation efficiency. On account of this, the paper puts forward an artificial intelligence-based corporate financial-risk-prevention (FRP) model, which includes four stages: data preprocessing, feature selection, feature classification, and parameter adjustment. Firstly, relevant financial index data are collected, and the quality of the selected data is raised through preprocessing; secondly, the chaotic grasshopper optimization algorithm (CGOA) is used to simulate the behavior of grasshoppers in nature to build a mathematical model, and the selected data sets are selected and optimized for features. Then, the support vector machine (SVM) performs classification processing on the quantitative data with reduced features. Empirical risk is calculated using the hinge loss function, and a regular operation is added to optimize the risk structure. Finally, slime mould algorithm (SMA) can optimize the process to improve the efficiency of SVM, making the algorithm more accurate and effective. In this study, Python is used to simulate the function of the corporate business finance risk prevention model. The experimental results show that the CGOA-SVM-SMA algorithm proposed in this paper achieves good results. After calculation, it is found that the prediction and decision-making capabilities are good and better than other comparative models, which can effectively help supply chain enterprises to prevent financial risks.

Retailing and servicing strategies for an imperfect production with variable lead time and backorder under online-to-offline environment

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Online-to-offline (O2O) retailing strategy is one of the trending topics in the business industry. The current study focuses on an advanced retailing strategy for a single item for a retailer and a manufacturer. Reminding the revolution in the internet world, a dual-channel retailing system is developed in this current study. The retailer offers their item through online and offline mode, though the producer prefers only offline mode. Besides, manufacturer provide different services to their clients through the product's life cycle to keep the company's brand image. The product's demand depends on the selling price and its service for both channels (offline and online) to their customers. To upgrade the services, some investments are implied to decrease the lead time. In expansion, to increase the demand and optimize the system benefit, the manufacturer gives their customers different services (unpaid, partially paid, full paid). The supply chain's benefit is optimized beside the ideal esteem of the decision variables. {Application of different service strategies in O2O retailing are near about <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ 71\% $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> beneficial compared to traditional supply chain. Numerical experiment proved that full-paid services are near about <inline-formula><tex-math id="M2">\begin{document}$ 79\% $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> beneficial compare to partially paid service; however, partially paid services are recommended for industrial benefit.} Different numerical examples, exceptional cases, and sensitivity analyses were performed to prove the model's applicability along with graphical representations.</p>