The emergence of the underlying blockchain technology of bitcoin has gained extensive attention from researchers and practitioners. As distributed ledger technology, blockchain widely finds its applications in the supply chain to mitigate issues related to transparency, information sharing, process efficiency, and traceability. This study employed a knowledge-based visualization technique to create a vision beyond other review studies on the blockchain-based supply chain. We used bibliometric and network analysis to synthesize the previous literature. In total, 431 articles in the timespan of 2017 to April 2022 from Scopus and Web of Science (WOS) databases were analyzed after applying search string, inclusion, and exclusion criteria. Basic information was extracted from initial data screening; then, data was analyzed on the grounds of co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling, citation, co-authorship, and co-citation analysis. In addition, thematic analysis was performed to analyze the content of the previous studies, adopted research methods, and dynamic industries in the literature. Besides all these, we identified various research gaps and proposed research directions for future study. We believe that this study provides adequate knowledge to academic scholars and supply chain practitioners to fast-track the current research in the supply chain domain using blockchain technology.
PurposeThis study aims to identify and prioritize the challenges to adopting blockchain in supply chain management and to make its taxonomic model. Moreover, validate whether these challenging factors exist in the real world and, if they exist, then in what percentage.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopted the fuzzy best-worst method (F-BWM), which integrates fuzzy set theory with the best-worst method to identify and prioritize the prominent challenges of the blockchain-based supply chain by developing a weighted multi-criteria model.FindingsA total of 20 challenges (CH's) were identified. Lack of storage capacity/scalability and lack of data privacy challenges were found as key challenges. The findings of this study will provide a robust framework of the challenges that will assist academic researchers and industry practitioners in considering the most significant category concerning their working area.Practical implicationsBlockchain provides the best solution for tracing and tracking where RFID has not succeeded. It can improve quality management in a supply chain network by improving standards and speeding up operations. For inventory management, blockchain provides transparency of documentation for both parties within no time.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, no previous research has adopted the fuzzy best-worst method to prioritize the identified challenges of blockchain implementation in the supply chain. Moreover, no study provides a taxonomic model for the challenges of implementing a blockchain-based supply chain.
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