A Case Study Analysis on Opportunities of Blockchain Technology as an Enterprise System

Permanently changing as well as challenging business environments necessitate corporations to become well-equipped and versed in combating upcoming issues in terms of their company’s survival in order to not become obsolete. However, this is exactly what new technologies do: they test preconceived notions about how something should be and to a certain extent, reinvent the wheel. Disruption is they key word which is often used in this context and more precisely, disruptive technologies lead to transformations that sometimes even question the core and substance of traditional enterprises. Moreover, in today’s fast paced society trust has become a highly valuable commodity and, in this regard, blockchain technology has received a vital status in guaranteeing an immutable, irreversible and new approach to various forms of blockchain-based enterprise-resource-planning systems within companies. However, a scarcity of research can be identified from the industry perspective as the majority of literature emphasizes academic realms. Consequently, this master thesis tries to close the gap and shed light on the feasibility of enterprisegrade blockchain solutions within a company. More precisely, it explores the current IT landscape of a case study company and in which areas room for improvement can be identified. Hence fields are investigated in which blockchain technology might be a fitting solution. In spite of this, as results show, blockchain technology and other new technologies fail to be implemented mainly due to the fact that higher management is not giving importance to it. This relates to an inherent problem of the corporate culture, which then inhibits innovation. Besides this, fields in which an application is feasible in current times are depicted. Above all, the collected findings demonstrate valuable information and insights regarding the reasons why it can(not) be implemented in current times and the underlying conditions for it. Thus, the relevance of higher management giving an impetus to explore new technologies at a greater scale is highlighted.