# Blockchain and Information Integration: Applications in New Zealand's Prefabrication Supply Chain
## 4 Results and Discussion
### Attributes of Information  
Logistics integration, trust and collaboration occur in the supply chain as a result of information integration [24]. However, when information exchange is not quite streamlined, supply chains experience uncertainty [64]. The absence of efficient information integration has been proven to cause several drawbacks in literature, including fragmentation, distrust and scepticism in supply chains [65]. Essential qualities of information affecting information integration are transparency, traceability and security [10; 13; 21]. Information transparency is interpreted as a decrease in the level of uncertainty or a reduction in the expectation heterogeneousness amongst the participants in an uncertain circumstance [66]. Transparency is acknowledged to be one of the most critical attributes of information affecting the success of supply chains [13]. In the prefabrication supply chain, transparent information exchange enhances collaboration and trust amongst partner organisations [10]. Traceability is another important quality of information contributing to the enhancement of supply chains. In prefabricated construction projects, where a vast number of materials are used to finalise a project, the characteristic of services and quality of materials give rise to the necessity of developing a traceable information integration system in which all the information regarding the origin of materials can transparently be traced [44]. Moreover, prefabrication is a method of construction aiming to reduce waste materials, energy consumption and carbon emissions by using green products to ensure the preservation of social and environmental elements [1]. These sustainability measures are acquired through mutual learnings from in-development projects. A project's knowledge is primarily made up of the information collated and stored throughout the project, which is practically impossible to condense into words [67]. This kind of knowledge is mostly communicated through person-to-person interactions, where the possibility of forgetting parts of it is high [68]. New IT systems can help capture the knowledge and convert it to data that is easy to be stored [67]. [PERSON] [31] states that some of these new IT systems are electronic bulletin boards, decision-making computer systems, web/online databases and knowledge gateways. These systems are being substituted for decentralised systems where information security is assured [19]. The ability to trace the information flow for prefabricated materials used in construction projects ascertains the sustainability metrics and significantly improves clients-customers' views on the genuineness of products, which helps supply chain partners build up better collaborative and trustworthy partnerships [17]. The last information attribute investigated in this study is security. Information security refers to the long-term preservation of the authenticity of records and the integrity of the data [69]. Information communicated in an organisation varies from reports or technical drawings to contracts and statutory documents [70]. These forms of information need a protected information-sharing engine to enable the secure preservation of learnings for future use. Thus, adequate information security systems are required to ensure the safe transition of one project's learnings to the next, assisting the integration in the construction supply chain. In this study, the questionnaire survey determined to what extent transparency, traceability and security (system reliability) were, respectively, significant to the success of the respondents' organisations. These information qualities were tested using a five-point Likert scale to obtain experts' opinions on the importance and impact of each attribute on the success of the prefabrication supply chain in New Zealand. The result is presented in a clustered bar chart in Figure 3. A high percentage of respondents strongly confirmed that the identified attributes are crucial to the performance of prefabrication supply chain.