BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAINS: TOWARDS REVOLUTIONIZING THE INDUSTRY OF THE FUTURE

Globally, digitalization is transforming manufacturing industries and other sectors positively. Modern supply chain networks are being driven by digital data. Today's Supply Chain Management comprises complex systems and processes that spans across different ecosystems, partners, diverse geographies and controlled by multiple stakeholders. The complexities of today supply chain management systems have led to ineffectiveness across the entire value chain and causes delay in transaction and lack of trust between client and organization across the world. The advent of emerging digital technologies such as blockchain has introduced a distributed digital ledger technology that provides traceability, transparency and security, and thereby addressing one of the major supply chain problems. Blockchain technology and digital supply chain have been identified as highly promising technology that is working together to revolutionize industries of the future. Blockchain is gaining the attention of both industry and academia and this has led to the emerging of different research across different domains such as additive manufacturing, healthcare, production management, automotive, supply chain, etc. However, there is still a gap in literature around digital supply chain and little research have been conducted. This paper focuses on the application of blockchain in supply chain in the digital age. This paper reviews the current position of blockchain business across different sectors and the supply chain management and strategy for emerging technology based on recent Gartner's market research report. This paper uses case studies of four supply chain industries (Walmart, De Beers Group, Unilever, and FedEx) to investigate the challenges being facing by these companies and how they used blockchain technology to approach these issues. This study made some deductions from the case studies companies investigated. Lastly, this paper uses a SWOT analysis to evaluate the present and future prospects of blockchain technology for supply chains.