A Meta-review of Blockchain Adoption Literature in Supply Chain

Supply chains are increasingly adopting industry 4.0 technologies to meet exceeding stakeholder expectations. Blockchain technology offers an opportunity to facilitate the digital transformation of supply chains. Supply chains can benefit from the characteristics of blockchain including through transparency, traceability, and immutable data, to enable for example quality, sustainability, provenance, and safety. Adoption considerations for blockchain are important to ensure needs are met in the early adoption stages and further stages of deployment. This study aims to explore the adoption considerations for blockchain across supply chain domains reported in the literature, focusing on adoption factors and readiness. Research methodology used is a meta-analysis of literature review studies on blockchain adoption in supply chains to identify themes. The review identified 102 papers from four databases, and 33 are selected for analysis, identifying 64 blockchain adoption factors. Security, system integration, trust, scalability, costs, and traceability are found to be important blockchain adoption factors for supply chain. The adoption factors show a spread over a people-process-technology framework. Limitations of the research and areas for future research are highlighted.