How can Blockchain and IoT transform supply chain management?
Supply chain management is a complicated area that has various challenges. For many years, businessmen of different industries have been working on providing just-in-time safe delivery and supply chain transparency.
Blockchain technology has tremendous potential to transform supply chain management. By storing and managing supply chain data and allowing autonomous transactions, it can help companies ensure customer trust and data security over disparate supply chain partners.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger that maintains a continuously growing number of transactions and data records. In fact, it is a technology of decentralized data storage that provides a high-security level and data manipulation according to certain rules.
Representing an inconvertible data record, blockchain ensures the security of financial transactions and data exchanges, also providing users with data access and enabling them to monitor transactions’ completion. A user can be sure that his or her personal information won’t be stolen.
Another advantage is that blockchain uses cryptography, making data forge impossible. Each block contains a hash to the previous block, making the substitution of an intermediate block in the chain impossible. Also, a network’s distributed nature requires computer servers to come to a consensus, that allows transactions to be carried out between autonomous parties.
A blockchain-based supply chain management is built on the idea of a shared distributed ledger that provides an immutable record of all data related to package/container/product/truck status, location, and food storage conditions as well.
The potential of Blockchain in supply chain management lies in three areas:
In a new survey from Business Insider Intelligence, they analyzed an increasing role of Blockchain technology in the IoT ecosystem. Here are the main takeaways:
When being integrated with the Internet of Things, blockchain can offer logistics companies delivery speed and cost savings across a variety of applications. When we see logistics as the process of getting things from A to B and add the aspects of autonomy and transparency to it, we come to an innovative approach that brings security and optimization.
IoT and blockchain can push supply chain management to the next level. Imagine, how the transportation process can work: multiple sensors track things like location, delivery stages, and food storage conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.
