Leveraging Blockchain for sustainability and supply chain resilience in e-commerce channels for additive manufacturing: A cognitive analytics management framework-based assessment

Additive manufacturing is one emergent dimension in the field of manufacturing that envisions positive ripple effect across multiple domains. Additive manufacturing is defined as the layer by layer process through which materials are added to replicate the 3D model data (Jin et al., 2017). Additive manufacturing, also known as digital manufacturing, rapid manufacturing and 3D printing, may provide firms with strategic, sustainable and competitive advantages (S. Shukla et al., 2018).

Extant research suggests that collaboration of different stakeholders in the additive manufacturing helps in product customization, lowering the cycle time and cost of product development (Lan, 2009). E-commerce provides an opportunity for engaging different stakeholders in their varied capacities to contribute to the development and innovation of Additive Manufacturing with benefits viz large scale customized and flexible production in a sustainable fashion. This amalgamation of E-commerce with Additive Manufacturing is called as E-commerce channels for Additive Manufacturing (ECAM). ECAM has a great growth potential and prowess to aid in product realizations, design innovations, customizations and development of the robust business ecosystem around additive manufacturing (S. Shukla et al., 2018). However, the positioning of ECAM present a premise of their working beyond the defined boundaries of trust and thus these systems should be aided with assured technical capabilities to operationalize successfully given the conditions.

Extant research identifies four major e-commerce channels for additive manufacturing namely: Tele-Manufacturing, Collaborative manufacturing, Localized manufacturing and User manufacturing (Eyers & Potter, 2015; S. Shukla et al., 2018). Tele-manufacturing, collaborative manufacturing and User manufacturing requires transfer of design files across the network. In these e-commerce channels, interaction with many stakeholders are involved and each step requires building trust based relationships and exchange mechanism of artefacts in concern (Eyers & Potter, 2015). The stakeholders can include a variety of participants viz. Additive Manufacturers, Designers, Logistics, Enterprises, Investors and Customers among others for complex business interactions. This requires a need to establish aspects like transparency, traceability and consensus among others (Berlak and Weber, 2004, Eyers and Potter, 2015; S. Shukla et al., 2018). Verifiability of the components used in manufacturing, protection of IP and copyrights and need for establishing provenance in a transparent way are few of other pressing challenges (Alkhader et al., 2020). Further there are also unique security requirements to the system. This new landscape also requires authenticity and guarantee, apart from the system integrity required in traditional manufacturing. The associated design files need to be strongly protected from any kind of unauthorized disclosures (Safford & Wiseman, 2019). In complex supply chain systems spanning multiple geographies, trustworthiness plays a fundamental and important role (Alkhader et al., 2020).

The righteous inclination of governance and society in recent years to develop business ecosystems in holistic manner that comprise of environmental and social considerations also apart from the dimension of commercial or economic success also bring in some thoughtful considerations for the requirement and success narrative of ECAM (Ramezankhani et al., 2018; S. Shukla et al., 2018). ECAM need to assure its stakeholders on aspects like equitable payments, sustainable means of manufacturing, complying with labour laws of the land, usage of green raw material, optimal impact on natural resources and environment among others (Min & Kim, 2012). This ensures the positioning and development of ECAM in a sustainable manner for future as well as present.

Furthermore, the premise of Supply Chain Resilience (SCRes) which aids in assisting supply chains to respond effectively to the disruptions like pandemic, natural disasters, global unrest etc. and deliver on promises to the customers in a stipulated time frame is also an important tenet for the success of ECAM (Ponomarov and Holcomb, 2009, Schmitt and Singh, 2012). Recent advent of COVID-19 pandemic (World Health Organization Situation Report, 2020), which caused large scale implications not only to the dimension of commercial success, but also on varied human and social premises calls out for design (or redesign) of supply chains in a fashion of swift, prompt and effective response (Sabarigirisan et al., 2021; S. Shukla, 2020). Other critical tenets like variability in demands, complex interactions, product life cycle management, adaptability to customer requirements are other factors that need to encompassed for attaining SCRes (Ghadge et al., 2012, Pereira et al., 2014). Thus, the envision of success of ECAM is incomplete without incorporation of SCRes.

Considering the premise of technical dimension of ECAM, sustainability dimension and SCRes dimension, it is highly inevitable to imagine a success trajectory of ECAM in present and in future without realizing these tenets in an apt fashion.

The overall technical and non-technical requirements and challenges of the ECAM direct the attention of the research discussion towards the emerging technological premise of blockchain technology. The attributes of the blockchain technology closely aligns with the issues faced in the ECAM.

Blockchain is a decentralised and distributed ledger system which is the basis technology for the popularly known cryptocurrency Bitcoin (Nakamoto, 2008). Blockchain provides robustness, immutability and security as it does not have any one point of failure (Parekh et al., 2021, Sabarigirisan et al., 2021). Blockchain has the ability to provide digital trust and ownership as it is based on principles of distributed governance rules (Gaur, 2019, Pawar et al., 2020; R. G. Shukla et al., 2021, Sonje et al., 2021). Blockchain also helps in information integrity and guarantee reliability of information. It protects against identity frauds and property of immutability helps in keeping the records secure against any frauds for a long period of time (Lemieux, 2016; R. G. Shukla et al., 2021). Smart contracts which is a supporting infrastructure of Blockchain is a computerized transaction protocol which gets executed when pre-determined terms are met without any intervention, and aids in reducing the uncertainty and inducing system rationality (Christidis & Devetsikiotis, 2016; R. G. Shukla et al., 2020). The concept of NFT in Blockchain aids to encode an artefact in concern on or off the chain to establish authenticity and security (Okonkwo, 2021). NFTs encode content and make them unique content using smart contracts, thus making it easier for verification and provenance. NFTs are usually run on highly secure systems in a decentralized peer-to-peer network using cryptographic verifications. NFTs help in creating new markets (BridgetWilson et al., 2021). Each NFT is unique and cannot be exchanged for a like for a like, thus making them non-fungible. Thus by using NFT based smart contracts, a creator and the owner can prove their ownership of digital assets. (Wang et al., 2021). Thus, the inherent properties of blockchain viz. anonymity, trust, transparency, traceability, provenance, business logic incorporation, decentralization, audibility and persistence among others help in creating an appropriate technological solution for ECAM even when the credibility of the stakeholders are not known or they work beyond the boundaries of trust.

However, the extant research lacks an exploration of ideating, understanding and analysing the impact of Blockchain adoption in ECAM. Further, this work also aims to explore the impact of this adoption on aspects of sustainability and SCRes which are critical success factors of the evolving paradigm of ECAM as discussed above. In order to facilitate the success of ECAM, it is essential to ensure the solution to technical requirements of the systems, however, a simultaneous convergence on sustainability and SCRes is equally important. Thus, in this research work, we study the premise of leveraging Blockchain as a solution for ECAM that suffices to the technical requirements as well as the premise of sustainability and SCRes using Cognitive Analytics Management based framework (Osman et al., 2019). We use the combination of Value Focused Thinking (VFT) (Keeney, 1994) in the Cognitive dimension of the CAM framework to assess the key objectives of the stakeholders on the dimensions of technical requirements, sustainability and SCRes. We use a robust analytical modelling approach to measure the impact of Blockchain adoption for developing a sustainable and SCRes ECAM system using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) (Axelrod, 1976, Kosko, 1986) based scenario analysis which analyses the interplay between objectives identified in the Cognitive dimension of the CAM framework. The key research objectives addressed in this study are presented below:

To identify the key tenets on technical requirements, sustainability and SCRes for ECAM using the premise of CAM framework with the cognitive tool of VFT and insights from extant research

To provide a convergence mapping of Blockchain Technology Attributes (BTA) to the key tenets identified above through VFT in terms of catering to the requirement elicitation of sustainable and SCRes ECAM system apart from meeting the technical requirements

To analyse the interplay between these factors using CAM framework with the Analytical tool of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps as a scenario planning agent to analytically understand the impact of Blockchain adoption for sustainable and SCRes ECAM system

To disseminate the results, insights and recommendations in the Management dimension of the CAM framework for building a sustainable and SCRes ECAM system

Thus, this research work provides a flexible and interactive framework of CAM to ideate, understand and analyse Blockchain adoption for sustainable and SCRes ECAM based on the grounding of stakeholder cognition. The usage of VFT and FCM aids in value assessment and scenario planning based on stakeholder cognition which makes the insights real, flexible and applicable. This work also provides an insight into the aspects of design, coherence and integration of blockchain with ECAM. Finally, the work is also a holistic and niche work in the extant research which provides a change management strategy for digital transformation of ECAM which are compliant and encompassing to the aspects of sustainability and SCRes.

The rest of the paper is organized as below. Section 2 provides literature review on important topics related to this work. Section 3 presents a detailed perspective on the research methodology and important methodological tools and framework used in the extant of this research work. Section 4 presents the discussion around formation of scenario planning based analytical approach based on cognitive aspects unravelled though VFT and the variational effects generated through interaction effect of different parameters. Section 5 presents the implications of this research work. Section 6 summarizes the conclusion and future work.