Supply chain finance (SCF) is concerned with capital flows throughout a supply chain, an area that has been overlooked in previous decades. Supply chain finance (SCF) is a proven way for lowering financing costs and increasing finance efficiency. The purpose of this research is to look at the most important aspects of supply chain financing that have recently emerged. To map the knowledge structure of this topic, SLR and network analysis on SCF were conducted. In order to perform this systematic review, a sample of 1086 papers from 2000-2021 were gathered from data sources such as Proquest using search terms. The most often occurring terms in the title and author keywords were determined using Knime Analytics software. Relevant networks were built with the use of Vos viewer to locate prominent nations where research in the connected subject is being conducted, and keyword co-occurrence, authors, journals, countries, and year-wise data were retrieved.
Top1. Introduction
Supply Chain Finance (SCF) has become more essential in operational and financial procedures, attracting both academic and business interest. Supply chain finance has been defined as “Managing, planning and controlling all the transaction activities and processes related to the flow of cash among supply chain stakeholders in order to improve their working capital” (More & Basu, 2013). After the financial crisis of September 2008, when bank and financial institution loans were dramatically reduced, supply chain financing (SCF) became increasingly important. Other types of alternative finance, particularly trade credit from suppliers, were increasingly difficult to obtain. An extension of trade credit, on the other hand, is susceptible to bargaining strength, with weaker suppliers being forced to extend the payment period or forcefully postpone repayment (Fabbri and Klapper 2016). This might put the supply chain at risk or cause interruption (Caniato et al. 2016). As a result, there is a need for better working capital management and optimization in the supply chain, which SCF aims to achieve. SCF is also said to make finances more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). It also helps to look at working capital management from a supply chain viewpoint rather than a single company one.
The main focus in the SCF approach is on taking an inter-company view of financial flows with customers, suppliers and service providers to better share the risks and value of financial flows among the supply chain members (Pfohl and Gomm, 2009). SCF sought to assist businesses in meeting their daily finance demands in order to improve inter-organizational cash flow. Since SCF is a relatively new solution compared to traditional approaches (e.g., equity financing or mortgaging), research in this area is very new (Lamoureux and Evans 2011, Camerinelli 2009 and Hofmann 2005). In the last several years, a slew of scholarly studies has been published on supply chain finance. In the current study, systematic literature review of the published articles was conducted.
A systematic literature review is a method to rigorously review the research results by synthesising the qualified scientific studies on a certain topic or research question (RQ). The objectives of SLR are to not only collect the findings of previous research but also provide evidence-based support to industrial practitioners (Kitchenham et al. 2009). Previous systematic literature reviews (SLR) on the topic of Supply Chain Finance (SCF) have been limited to different timelines and perform a comprehensive review on the topic, primarily listing the themes in the subject matter. For example, Gelsomino and colleagues (2016) reflect in their SLR that two main orientations on SCF exist – one, focusing on short term solutions or finance oriented and second, focusing on accounts or supply chain oriented. Another review article has established the role of supply chain finance in sustainability performing a thematic content analysis listing motives, practices and outcomes of Sustainable SCF (Jia, Zhang & Chen, 2020). Jia and colleagues (2020) in another article combine SLR on SCF with Information processing theory to develop a conceptual framework for supply chain integration (Jia et.al., 2020). Many other works have performed SLR on this topic to link SCF and firm performance (Ali, Gongbing, Mehreen & Ghani, 2020; Bui, 2020), develop decision making models (Abdel-Bassett et.al., 2020), focusing on specific industrial sector applications (Doan & Bui, 2020; Guo & Liu, 2020), and so on. However, none of these articles report the state of art on the research publications on the topic of SCF till date. Besides this, to the best of the knowledge of authors, a few numbers of works apply either network analysis or bibliometric analysis to conduct SLR on the topic of SCF, and even their timelines are limited till the year 2016 (Xu et.al., 2018). Therefore, this research work attempts to conduct SLR on the topic of Supply Chain Finance published in the ProQuest database till the year 2021, by applying the techniques of network analysis.