Abstract
In recent decades, sustainability and green supply chain management have played essential roles in business operations. This chapter examines how the textile and apparel supply chains can comply with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, verifying the source of raw materials and maintaining visibility of merchandise products and related services while moving through the value-chain network is challenging. The internet of things (IoT) application can help textile and apparel supply chain operation managers observe, monitor, and track products and relevant business processes within their respective value chain networks. However, the IoT infrastructural components have a shortage of computational processing power and local saving capability, and these components are vulnerable to the privacy and security of collected data. This chapter presents blockchain technology with IoT-based infrastructural elements and service-oriented computing architecture as a solution for information processing for apparel supply chain management.
TopIntroduction
The image of a modern textile and apparel supply chain has become inseparably associated with its care for ecological aspects and sustainable development. The United Nations' new sustainable development goals for 2030 have come into force since 2016, which initiated seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs, 2023). The SDGs will demonstrate the new objectives of economic, social, and environmental developments, such as ending poverty, economic growth, and environmental protection are the few important ones. SDGs call for everyone worldwide to contribute to the goals, including governments, companies, civil organizations, and the public. For example, the textile and apparel industries require labour-intensive manufacturing, an extended value chain, and relatively high environmental pollution (Choi et al., 2019), attracting researchers and practitioners' significant attention to find solutions for industry-specific sustainability-related issues.
In this way, supply chain sustainability is a central theme of most business organizations. The main objective of sustainable supply chains is to create and maintain long-term economic, social, and environmental value for all stakeholders involved in delivering products and services to specific markets. Consequently, all businesses today appreciate the value of supply chain management (SCM) and sound operational practices, and the advantages of digitization of its business processes have become a popular topic in both sustainable commercial operations and academic research purposes (Pal, 2019). Research has shown that sustainability has become necessary for businesses considering social and environmental issues in their strategies. It is also essential that businesses and their supply chains accelerate the shift from focus to sustainability and use technologies to digitalize business processes (Pal, 2019). In addition, business organizations are already making significant investments in digital supply chains because they recognize that digitalization will give them five big prizes: integration, transparency, productivity, sustainability, and, ultimately, the opportunity to transform their supply chain operating model.
Moreover, sustainability is essential for accessing global markets and accomplishing high profits (Pal, 2021). For example, while sustainable shipment management was considered a cost in the past, now, thanks to modern technologies (e.g., IoT, radio frequency identification, blockchain, and cloud computing), it is possible to guarantee sustainable logistics. Indeed, using these emerging technologies, improving carbon emissions-related issues and saving resources is possible. One of the most critical requirements for sustainable supply chain management demands the transparency of information and appropriate communication mechanisms between the supply chain business stakeholders. In order to earn these goals, it is essential to have adequate information and communication technology (ICT) standards that ensure the reliability of information systems architectures and foolproof security of operational data.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Blockchain: In simple, a blockchain is just a data structure that can be shared by different users using computing data communication network (e.g., peer-to-peer or P2P). Blockchain is a distributed data structure comprising a chain of blocks. It can act as a global ledger that maintains records of all transactions on a blockchain network. The transactions are time-stamped and bundled into blocks where each block is identified by its cryptographic hash .
Immutability: This term refers to the fact that blockchain transactions cannot be deleted or altered.
Provenance: In a blockchain ledger, provenance is a way to trace the origin of every transaction such that there is no dispute about the origin and sequence of the transactions in the ledger.
Internet of Things (IoT): The Internet of Things (IoT), also called the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet, is now a technology paradigm envisioned as a global network of machines and devices capable of interacting with each other. The IoT is recognized as one of the most critical areas of future technology and is gaining vast attention from a wide range of industries.
Decentralized Computing Infrastructure: These computing infrastructures feature computing nodes that can make independent processing and computational decisions irrespective of what other peer computing nodes may decide.
Block: A block is a data structure used to communicate incremental changes to the local state of a node. It consists of a list of transactions, a reference to a previous block and a nonce.
Supply Chain Management: A supply chain consists of a network of key business processes and facilities, involving end-users and suppliers that provide products, services, and information. In this chain management, improving the efficiency of the overall chain is an influential factor; and it needs at least four important strategic issues to be considered: supply chain network design, capacity planning, risk assessment and management, and performances monitoring and measurement.
Warehouse: A warehouse can also be called a storage area, and it is a commercial building where raw materials or goods are stored by suppliers, exporters, manufacturers, or wholesalers, they are constructed and equipped with tools according to special standards depending on the purpose of their use.
Cryptography: Blockchain’s transactions achieve validity, trust, and finality based on cryptographic proofs and underlying mathematical computations between various trading partners.