Stakeholders' involvement in green supply chain: a perspective of blockchain IoT-integrated architecture

Abstract

Purpose

Environmental sustainability has become a primary factor for organisations to compete globally. Stakeholders' involvement with necessary commitment at the right stage of supply chain management (SCM) plays a vital role in development of green supply chain. This paper aims to explore the involvement aspect of stakeholders towards greening of the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical success factors for stakeholder involvement in development of green supply chain and develop use cases for managers and practitioners planning to implement recent technologies to support stakeholders' involvement.

Design/methodology/approach

After a thorough literature survey and interviews with experts from industry and academia, the factors for involvement of stakeholders for greening the supply chain were identified. A survey-based research has been used to collect primary data for effective people involvement in development of green supply chain. The decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method is used for ranking the critical success factors. Effective implementation of success factors using merits of blockchain and internet of things (IoT) technologies are discussed. Use cases are developed for practitioners for using a blockchain IoT-integrated architecture.

Findings

The results show that criterion C21 (cooperation with buyer for green initiatives) is the most important for green supply chain, and criterion C5 (global customers) has least effect on greening the supply chain. Involving stakeholders in the green product design ensures improved efficiency of the supply chain. Merits of technologies like blockchain and IoT may be reaped successfully for incorporating critical success factors to develop green supply chain.

Research limitations/implications

The research can further be extended by developing the research model with hypothesis and conducting a survey for validation. Automobile industry use cases are considered for this research, and it may be further developed for different industry sectors like process industries, service, etc.

Practical implications

Managers can make use of these 22 critical success factors and capabilities of the blockchain IoT-integrated architecture to successfully involve stakeholders. Practitioners/managers can dramatically change SCM with respect to the response speed, accuracy of decision-making, data acquisition, data storage and data accessibility, transparency, trust-building, opportunity of participation, communication quality, freedom in payment based on blockchain IoT-integrated architecture. Preventing pollution and converting the enterprises into green and sustainable organisations have created lot of concerns worldwide. This research addresses the issue of green initiatives and the role of stakeholders in improving the green status of industry.

Originality/value

Though there is research on involving suppliers and customers in the supply chain activities, there is a significant delay in integrating human resource management in the supply chain. This research proposes integration of stakeholders using recent technologies for green supply chain. Use cases developed for the automobile industry gives path to future research in this domain.

Citation

Rane, S.B., Thakker, S.V. and Kant, R. (2021), "Stakeholders' involvement in green supply chain: a perspective of blockchain IoT-integrated architecture", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 1166-1191. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEQ-11-2019-0248