sustainability Article Leveraging Smart Contract in Project Procurement through DLT to Gain Sustainable Competitive Advantages Evin Özkan 1 , Neda Azizi 2, * and Omid Haass 1   Citation: Özkan, E.; Azizi, N.; Haass, O. Leveraging Smart Contract in Project Procurement through DLT to Gain Sustainable Competitive Advantages. Sustainability 2021, 13, 13380. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su132313380 Academic Editors: Kerry London, Jian Zuo, Zelinna Pablo and Ruidong Chang Received: 27 October 2021 Accepted: 24 November 2021 Published: 3 December 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia; evinn.ozkan@gmail.com (E.Ö.); omid.haass@rmit.edu.au (O.H.) 2 School of Business, Torrens University Australia, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia * Correspondence: neda.azizi@torrens.edu.au Abstract: Project delivery on time, with agreed quality and assigned budget, is the desire of project- based companies. Time, quality, and cost are determinants of project success; however, organisations suffer from achieving these three success criteria at the same time. Failures in project delivery cause the loss of the competitive advantage. The recent digital technologies introduce smart contracts to supply chain (SC) operations for improving SC processes. Project procurement is the area for smart contract implementation to deliver successful projects and gain sustainable competitive advantages. The aim of this study was in explaining how smart contracts benefit project organisations through project procurement. Qualitative research design guided this research with phenomenology. Semi- structured interviews generated the data. The obtained research data were analysed with thematic, textual, and discourse analysis. Published industry reports were used to triangulate the data. This study demonstrated an integrated relationship model to answer the research question. The research findings initially identified the fact that smart contracts improve procurement efficiency through cost, time, and quality. Secondly, smart contracts build a trust-less platform where reliability is delivered and reinforced with transparency, traceability, and security. This study found that enhanced procurement efficiency and reliability meet requirements to gain sustainable competitive advantages. This study intends to contribute to industry practices and future research. The correlation of project procurement management success, smart contracts, and sustainable competitive advantages are expected to guide feature research and business practices. Keywords: project procurement management; smart contract; competitive advantage; qualitative research; sustainability 1. Introduction Project management is an approach which is becoming more and more important for today’s businesses. The Project Management Institute (PMI) [1] defines project management as a way of creating value and staying competitive in the business environment. The role of project management comes into prominence in industries such as construction, information technologies (IT), and manufacturing [2]. The project management body of knowledge correlates with 10 knowledge areas, with procurement management being one of them [1]. The challenge for project managers is to deliver successful projects whilst facing numerous risks [2]. The global project success rate is surveyed by the Project Management Institute (PMI) [3]. According to the results, less than 60% of analysed projects were delivered within the projected budget, and the rate of project completion on time remained slightly above 50%. The total project cost and time vary in parallel with the efficiency in the procurement process due to its association with payment and logistics activities. To give an example, from time to time, project managers might face material acquisition challenges such as payment, product misfit or raw material, product/service prices, delivery time, Sustainability 2021, 13, 13380. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132313380 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability