Supply chain management has never been simple. As most business owners who deal with logistics know, the more links there are in the chain the more complex it gets. This hasn’t been helped by the industry’s reliance on outdated technology, such as EDI, which has inhibited information flows by only allowing the point-to-point exchange of information. The inability to share information from end-to-end across a supply chain has resulted in limited visibility and insight into where a product is, and its current state, at any given moment.
The scale and complexity of today’s global supply chains pose problems that yesterday’s technology cannot solve. A number of new and exciting technologies are beginning to emerge that will address these issues including blockchain and IoT.
Blockchain tech is revolutionising logistics by providing:
- Greater visibility and savings – replacing EDI and paper-based systems alone will add up to billions of dollars in savings.
- High-quality data and better analytics – an almost unlimited database, with data that’s of much higher quality than data generated by traditional methods.
- Trust – cryptographically secured transactions are recorded chronologically in a shared digital ledger. Blockchain technology applications mean that a business can provide proof of a piece of cargo’s journey through the supply chain.
- Security – It is virtually impossible for people to tamper with records because they would have to instantaneously manipulate every single record on each copy of the shared ledger to go undetected.
Our previous insights paper, Automate trust in your supply chain, provides an overview of how blockchain is set to benefit the global supply chain. Our latest insights paper, New kid on the block, takes a more detailed look at how blockchain is poised to disrupt supply chain management and how businesses can rebuild their approach to supply chain management at the ecosystem level, and go from islands of insight to an integrated global view. You can download New kid on the block here.