The Role of Blockchain in Enterprise Procurement

Abstract

Disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, or the blockchain, have the potential to transform entire industries as previous publications have outlined. They especially offer new opportunities to improve existing processes in the dimensions of performance, cost, and quality. Despite a continuously growing number of contributions, research and practice lack an adequate understanding about how blockchain can be used to achieve these benefits. Against this backdrop, this paper presents the current state of blockchain research in the field of enterprise procurement and outlines several avenues for future research. Therefore, we define relevant processes and functions to build a research framework for structuring and categorizing the current body of literature. Our results suggest that previous work mostly focuses on blockchain application scenarios with a focus on communication and transaction, while widely neglecting numerous fields, such as data integrity and data access.