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Industry 4.0 is revolutionizing the manufacturing processes, quality improvements, and product distributions of companies (Leng et al., 2020). It helps enhance automation performance, predictive maintenance, and dynamic process improvement and most importantly provides a higher level of efficiency and increases a firm’s reaction to customers. While Industry 4.0 involves huge amounts of industrial data and information security issues, the emergence of blockchain with its advantages of immutability, decentralization, and automation has accelerated the realization of the smart factory and has become an emerging driver for economic development in the new era (Bolek et al., 2023; Hughes et al., 2019; Zuo, 2020). Weill and Woerner (2018) also indicated that this new technology can make corporations be more ready for future markets and strengthen their profitability by 16% in contrast to traditional corporates. This technology has drawn the widespread interest of businesses since 2009, and an excellent and full discussion of it appears in the literature (Luthra et al., 2022; Singla et al., 2023; Vincent et al., 2020; Yadav et al., 2020).
In the digital era, blockchain development is shifting from initial introduction and in-depth exploration to practical application today. The characteristics and advantages of blockchain appear to be more entrenched and have attracted entities around the world to jump into the torrent of related technology. As business executives see the potential and benefits of blockchain for business operation management, its adoption is inevitable (Pawczuk et al., 2019), and it also is a key competitive edge in today’s modern business world. Various organizations are investing more resources into setting up blockchain-based systems to accelerate their operation efficiency as well as capture new profit streams (Pawczuk et al., 2018).
The adoption and implementation of blockchain-enled systems have shown some progress in the real world in recent years (Pawczuk et al., 2020). At the same time, the adoption of blockchain is fundamentally changing as well as revolutionizing the entire corporate world. The field of enterprise operation management in the manufacturing industry involves diverse areas, such as production, manufacturing, and service (Hortovanyi et al., 2021; Khayer et al., 2020; Meredith et al., 1989). In today’s digital settings, internal and external environments have become more complex, making it hard for existing operation models to achieve the goal of comprehensive management (Lamba & Singh, 2017) – that is, traditional models cannot depict the full picture of a corporate’s operation status. Thus, there is an urgent requirement to realize how to create a safe, private, and reliable work environment for corporates. The unique capabilities of blockchain provide an effective solution for massive datasets generated from multiple sources in real time. Enterprises are thus importing blockchain technology into legacy systems to conduct effective operation management (Lohmer & Lasch, 2020). At the same time, blockchain is triggering a destructive business model for manufacturing enterprises that implement the technology.