Uncovering the challenges of blockchain technology in supply chain management

"We believe that this new supply chain solution will be a transformative technology with the potential to completely disrupt and change the way global trade is done”, says Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President, Industry Platforms, IBM (PORT Technology, 2017). Lately, no other information technology (IT) is gaining more attention as blockchain technology (BCT) (Clemons et al., 2017). Though the main application of the BCT are cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (Moody’s Investors Service, 2016), thousands of startups are innovating new BCT-based applications in different industries, such as healthcare (Tierion, 2016), insurance and finance (McKinsey&Company, 2016) or manufacturing [e.g. modum.io, transp.com, @find 1 US, tradeIX]. While the widespread implementation will be way down the road (e.g. Gartner, 2017; Wüst and Gervais, 2017), researchers and practitioners around the world and from different disciplines are calling for new knowledge incorporating how BCT impact theory and practice (e.g. Clemons et al., 2017; Hendershott et al., 2017). Industries such as insurances or finance already have a relatively high rate of digital penetration with digital eco-systems made of various information systems (IS). They appear to be rather intuitive fields of application for BCT. However, applications to physical objects in the real world will not per se change the physical flows, but rather the information flows. Lately BCT is hyped in the field of supply chain management (Casey and Wong, 2017). Media and conceptual scientific contributions illustrate the immense potential of the technology. While Yli-Huumo et al. (2016) and Swan (2015) point out the technical challenges of the technology, there are also non-technical, social and economic challenges to overcome for the technology. This paper aims to address this gap and reveals non-technical challenges in the field of supply chain management.