Modelling the barriers of supply chain transparency in the post-COVID-19 scenario

Transparent supply chains have slowly gained prominence because of their utility in resolving sustainability concerns and improving operational efficiency and decision making. It requires companies to know more about their upstream chain and communicate it to their internal and external stakeholders. This in turn helps build resilience into the supply chains, making response quicker in the face of disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite both the necessity and obligation, companies are struggling with implementing a transparent supply chain because of unclear reasons. In this paper, we identify and model those barriers in implementing transparent supply chains. Results suggest that customer privacy drives other barriers in the system and hence should be given adequate importance while forming the data pipeline for transparent supply chains. Vague short-term ROI, low technology adoption, and underdeveloped infrastructure also emerged as critical barriers that managers should carefully mitigate while implementing transparency in supply chains.