The Digital Transformation of the Supply Chain management: Challenges of applying Blockchain technology

International audienceThe application of blockchain in the supply chain management process has caused a lot of ink to flow over the past three years, especially in the period between 2018 and 2021. This is due to the advantages this technology could present for supply chain’ managers who seek maximum transparency and fluidity to optimize the management of logistics operations and to improve theprofitability of their companies. The complexity of the supply chain, with its vast and diverse network of actors, lies in the existence of hidden elements for the supplier and the consumer, which consequently poses the problem of information asymmetry. The lack of transparency in the monitoring of the various actors in the supply chain can give rise to ethically dubious activities such as the exploitation of natural and human resources, the creation of environmental footprints, the contribution in production waste and transport. (Baker et al., 2015). In order to facilitate product traceability, stand against fraud, and reduce waste during the transport of goods, blockchain, as a distributed, transparent and incorruptible ledger, can precisely help fight the opacity of these supply chains, and lead to much faster diagnoses on the sources of failure. In this article we will try to assess the impact of the application of blockchain on supply chain management in several sectors such as health, agri-food, luxury goods and distribution. The results have already demonstrated a positive correlation between the blockchain and the supply chain, particularly in the food industry, which is the most likely to be impacted by this technology, with the system of traceability, transparency and control of all transactions, which is important to gain the trust of all stakeholders (Kchetrie, 2018, Lu and Xu, 2017). In addition, the results show that the use of this technology could reduce transaction time and costs with its decentralized exchange system, something that has already been confirmed in the work of Christidis and Devetsikiotis (2016)