Blockchain and Ioe Coming Together for Improved Supply Chain Benefits
A bigger challenge for most of the existing supply chains involves tracking of the item as it moves through the manufacturer to the transporter and warehouse, and finally to the store. With today’s globalized supply chains, manual tracking of shipments is not feasible as the number of suppliers and shipment volumes has exploded. A blockchain that provides immutable, trusted and irreversible access to data can help solve the issues with its key components like hyperledger fabric, smart contracts, peer nodes and orderer nodes that make it so useful for the globalized supply chain operations.
IoE in supply chain blockchain
Blockchain and IoE in supply chain add not only to efficiency but also add greater intelligence along the way. Automatically executed smart contracts can make this happen that contain contractual rights and obligations, and terms for payments for delivery of goods and services in an autonomous system which is trusted by all signatories of the smart contract.
The convergence of blockchain and IoT can allow for the movement of goods through supply chain with literally no manual inventory processes, resulting in huge efficiency gains at every level. This convergence will have huge implications for provenance. For instance, consumers can get to know exactly which farm bred their meat. Pharmaceutical industry requires shipment of drugs under certain temperature and controlled environmental conditions. An IoE enabled medical supply chain can issue alerts if these conditions are not met during the transit of drugs, so that corrective measures may be taken in good time with human intervention, else the smart contract may prevent the release of payments.
Blockchain use cases in supply chain
In automotive industry, blockchain can increase the efficiency of recall process. Smart contract can notify the supplier about the faulty parts of a particular vehicle or vehicles to be recalled. Blockchain can prove to be of real help in perishable items’ supply chain, such as of sea food. In the existing supply chains, it’s hard to find out the contaminated food item if there is some food fraud or an outbreak of disease. Projects like Pacific Tuna put a label on every tuna that makes its way from the ocean to the plate on your dining table.
Another use case of blockchain in supply chain is related to organic products. Just because something is labeled “organic” doesn’t mean it is. The farmer could have hidden the truth from the factory or the factory could have lied to the regulator. So, there are many possibilities that the product landing to you is indeed the same it is claimed to be.
Tracking the entire product journey and storage conditions
The blockchain empowered by IoT can introduce a new level of honesty into the supply chain, which is governed by mathematics, not by the people. Combined with sensors inside the trucks, containers and at the production site itself, a consumer can easily track the entire journey of the product, the temperature, humidity and other conditions it was kept before landing to their place, by just scanning a simple QR code having a true and irremovable record of its entire journey data.
Each stage of supply chain adds cost, and it’s here that IoT can have a radical impact on supply chain blockchain. To get a permissioned blockchain for your business, you need the assistance of blockchain consultants who could come up with customized and affordable solutions for you. Integrated IoT-blockchain supply chains are evolving steadily as they get deployed across a range of industry verticals and supply chains.
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