Blockchain Powering Supply Chain Management
Published on : Thursday 09-07-2020
Key takeaways from this article:
• Blockchain enables users to improve quality and customer experience.
• In IoT supply chains, blockchain can verify product provenance and track assets creating trusted relationships between suppliers and buyers.
• Several well-known companies have implemented blockchain in some of their supply chains.
Blockchain isn’t just for currency anymore. This digital ledger technology is a way of managing transactions and doing business. Combined with IoT infrastructure, blockchain can support and secure a wide range of supply chain transactions among businesses. Blockchain is a secure digital ledger that can track data to generate both trusted and immutable exchanges. IoT connects the networks, monitoring devices, and applications to track the locations and conditions of products in the supply chain.
In IoT supply chains, blockchain can verify product provenance and track assets, said Alexandra Rehak, an analyst at Omdia. It creates trusted relationships between suppliers and buyers by generating encrypted, unchangeable records. Rehak noted that blockchain isn’t used to increase revenue, but to enable users to improve quality and customer experience. Manufacturers of “branded goods,” from routers to luxury items, use it to track component parts to prevent gray market items from slipping into the supply chain. This application assures customers get what they pay for.
Several well-known companies have implemented blockchain in some of their supply chains. Most of these started with individual products, but users expect to deploy it across multiple products.
Tracking the Food Supply
In September 2018, Walmart launched its Food Traceability Initiative after a huge outbreak of E. Coli in romaine lettuce and Salmonella in various products, from eggs to breakfast cereal, rocked the grocery industry. It gave its sparkling leafy inexperienced providers a year to allow visibility into produce tracks from the store back to the farm. Tracing records consists of where the greens had been grown whilst they were harvested, and the deliver chain flows earlier than attaining Walmart’s facilities, stores, and clubs.
Early results encouraged Walmart to amplify the requirement to its inexperienced bell pepper providers, which have until July 2020 to undertake the blockchain platform. None of the providers has asked an extension notwithstanding the COVID-19 pandemic, in step with the organization officials. Walmart maintains to extend the rollout to supply sparkling, high-satisfactory, and safe foods to customers.
Walmart’s blockchain launched as a food protection initiative due to its cognizance of efficient supply chain management. But now the enterprise has accelerated its efforts to other parts of the business, such as merchandising, sourcing, era, and trade. It also conducted pilots with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency on facilitating the faster float of goods throughout borders. The enterprise anticipated to see incremental benefits as Walmart expands the initiative to different high-risk food gadgets over the following few years. The company ambitions to get smarter at dealing with food protection and first-rate throughout its deliver chains because it compiles more data at the blockchain in the coming years.