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Blockchain technology offers significant potential to manage the complexities of circular digital supply chains, yet companies face numerous obstacles during adoption. This research evaluates the barriers hindering the implementation of blockchain within viable circular digital supply chains, which combine circular economy principles, digital capabilities, and long-term resilience. Using a literature review alongside analytical hierarchy process and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory methods, the study analyses fourteen barriers to determine their relative importance and causal relationships. The most significant barriers identified include data transparency, market competition, missing infrastructure, lack of standardisation, complex protocols, lack of industry involvement, financial constraints, and interoperability challenges. These insights provide structured guidance for supply chain managers aiming to prioritise and address critical roadblocks when integrating blockchain into sustainable, resilient operations.
Modern supply chains require digital tools to support circular economy practices and survive unexpected disruptions. While blockchain promises to improve traceability and operational coordination, businesses often struggle with deployment. By identifying and ranking the most severe adoption barriers, this work helps industrial managers and decision-makers allocate resources effectively to resolve critical bottlenecks before committing substantial investments to blockchain integration.
This work provides an early-stage analytical and decision-making model rather than a deployable technology product. Supply chain executives, operations consultants, and technology strategists can use the barrier rankings to guide planning, risk assessment, and infrastructure investments for blockchain adoption. Because the research delivers conceptual prioritisation and causal mapping, practical commercial application remains at an early diagnostic stage ahead of system design and real-world deployment.
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Purpose Blockchain technology (BT) is creating a new standard for all business operations. It can assist businesses in handling the complexity of circular digital supply chain (DCM) management. Despite this optimistic view, several barriers hinder its implementation. In this regard, this study contributes to Industry 4.0, circular economy (CE), the viability with a critical emphasis on its potential ramifications and influence on the future agenda while using BT technology in the supply chain (SC). In addition, the research reduces the knowledge gap by investigating and ranking the key barriers to the deployment of BT in viable circular digital supply chains (VCDSCs) and studies their interdependencies and causal relationships. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach The barriers to BT adoption in the VCDSC are identified through a thorough literature review and considering viability performance. These barriers are then classified using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method. Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is then employed to examine the cause/effect, correlation, and connection among the 14 barriers selected barriers from the AHP classification to estimate each barrier's overall degree of impact over the others. Findings This paper identifies and analyzes the BT adoption barriers in the VCDSC as well as examines how the key barriers interact. As a result, according to the AHP/DEMATEL method, the most prominent influencing barriers to the BT implementation in the VCDSC are “Data transparency,” “Market competition,” “Missing infrastructure,” “Lack of standardization,” “Complex protocol,” “Lack of industry involvement,” “Financial constraints,” “Missing infrastructure,” “Data transparency” and “Interoperability.” The outcomes offer a potential path for identifying important barriers as well as insight into the implementation of BT in the SC while integrating different capabilities such as viability, sustainability and CE principles. Practical implications Managers and researchers will benefit from this research by gaining an understanding of the challenges that must be prioritized and examined for BT to be implemented successfully in the VCDSC. Originality/value The use and implementation of blockchain-enabled VCDSC continue to face challenges despite an increase in relevant practice and research. Despite the benefits of BT, managers struggle to apply such technology in the context of their company. In this respect, this paper uses an integrated AHP–DEMATEL for categorizing the BT barriers as well as the interrelationship between them. In this respect, this paper presents the BT barriers studied are those related to the use of BT in the SC while integrating different paradigms such as viability, digitalization and CE. While many studies look at the barriers to BT adoption; none of them has ever included the viable capability, which means the ability to “react agilely to positive changes, be resilient to absorb negative events and re-cover after disruptions and survive at long-term periods.” The study concludes with insightful comments based on the findings and suggestions for eradicating those obstacles and their associated effects.
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DOI: 10.1108/bij-04-2022-0240
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