Leveraging Digital Approaches for Transparency in Sustainable Supply Chains: A Conceptual Paper

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

There are few things to consider. I propose to indicate the exact aims of the deliberations, to provide a thesis and to describe the abditional methods. There is no justification for the choice of the research method, when referring to the conceptual article.

Author Response

Thank you for allowing us to submit a revised draft of the manuscript "Leveraging digital approaches for transparency in Sustainable Value Chains: A Conceptual Paper" for publication. We appreciate the time and effort that you and the reviewers dedicated to providing feedback on our manuscript and are grateful for the insightful comments on and valuable improvements to our paper. We have incorporated most of the suggestions made by the reviewers and made some changes to the manuscript. Please see below, for a point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments and concerns.

Response to the Reviewers:

As suggested by the reviewers: We have discussed Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) in its broadest sense incorporating all SCM scholarships that address social and ecological elements of performance, treating them equally valid as economic performance claims. The article focuses on the Supply Chain Transparency (SCT) element of SSCM.

We agree with the reviewers’ assessment and acknowledge the wider examination of SCT by Prior studies; this article anchors the analysis of the existing digital approaches in SSCM to the Garcia-Torres et al. (2019)'s SCT Framework. We provide an overview of the features of these digital approaches that makes them suitable for facilitating SCT.

Comment from Reviewers asking for the use of Blockchain Technology to be highlighted more in this paper.

Authors response: thank you for the suggestion. We have highlighted an overview of not only Blockchain Technology platforms as digital approaches in SCT but also other existing digital approaches such as Cloud computing, Artificial intelligence and Big Data. The intent of this paper is not to focus on only one specific digital approach but to provide an overview of existing digital approaches in order to initiate the discussion among scholars and practitioners on digital sustainable supply chain management.

Reviewer 2 Report

The study discuss the challenges and transparency need in sustainable value chains and provides an integrated framework of digitalization to Supply Chain transparency to be tested in different types of industries in future researches. The work presents an extensive bibliographic review of the theme but the presented framework is not scientifically proven. Although the authors point out this limitation for future investigations it should have more evidences of the applicability of the framework or theoretically grounded.

Author Response

Thank you for allowing us to submit a revised draft of the manuscript "Leveraging digital approaches for transparency in Sustainable Value Chains: A Conceptual Paper" for publication. We appreciate the time and effort that you and the reviewers dedicated to providing feedback on our manuscript and are grateful for the insightful comments on and valuable improvements to our paper. We have incorporated most of the suggestions made by the reviewers and made some changes to the manuscript. Please see below, for a point-by-point response to the reviewers' comments and concerns.

Response to the Reviewers:

As suggested by the reviewers: We have discussed Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) in its broadest sense incorporating all SCM scholarships that address social and ecological elements of performance, treating them equally valid as economic performance claims. The article focuses on the Supply Chain Transparency (SCT) element of SSCM.

We agree with the reviewers’ assessment and acknowledge the wider examination of SCT by Prior studies; this article anchors the analysis of the existing digital approaches in SSCM to the Garcia-Torres et al. (2019)'s SCT Framework. We provide an overview of the features of these digital approaches that makes them suitable for facilitating SCT.

Comment from Reviewers asking for the use of Blockchain Technology to be highlighted more in this paper.

Authors response: thank you for the suggestion. We have highlighted an overview of not only Blockchain Technology platforms as digital approaches in SCT but also other existing digital approaches such as Cloud computing, Artificial intelligence and Big Data. The intent of this paper is not to focus on only one specific digital approach but to provide an overview of existing digital approaches in order to initiate the discussion among scholars and practitioners on digital sustainable supply chain management.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The study discuss the challenges and transparency need in sustainable value chains and provides an integrated framework of digitalization to Supply Chain transparency to be tested in different types of industries in future researches. The work presents an extensive bibliographic review of the theme and was improved by offering a very interesting heuristic framework of digital approaches in Sustainable SCT.