Research Opportunities in Supply Chain Transparency

Abstract

More firms than ever before are disclosing provenance of their products, results of product testing, and suppliers’ labor-practice compliance with western norms in annual reports, sustainability reports, and press releases, besides making it available on third-party websites. The problem remains however that companies find collecting and disclosing such information not only to be costly and complicated, but also do not understand the benefits. To motivate further research on supply chain transparency, we first report recent examples of companies providing supply chain transparency. We also present potential benefits of supply chain visibility and supply chain transparency separately for the company. While terminology has not yet been standardized, this paper distinguishes visibility – managers’ efforts to learn more about operations upstream in their supply chains – from supply chain transparency, by which we mean a company disclosing information to consumers, investors, and other stakeholders about compliance to consumer-expected norms in its supply chain operations and products. Finally, we propose some topics for research on supply chain transparency arranged by stakeholder.

Keywords: Supply chain transparency, supply chain visibility, stakeholder resource-based view, research topics, stakeholders