Why Blockchain Might be The following Supply Chain

Blockchain technology might be shaking up a logistics in your area. It’s smarter, it’s faster, also it gets more participants on board.
Within a recent piece at Harvard Business Review, Michael J. Casey and Pindar Wong observe that blockchain — an online globally distributed general ledger that tracks transactions via online “smart contracts” — will produce “dynamic demand chains rather than rigid supply chains, producing more effective resource use for many.” They observe that a number of startups are developing around blockchain-enabled supply chains, and companies for example Walmart, IBM and BHP Billiton are launching efforts to better track the movement of products and knowledge.


Blockchain — enhanced by electronic tracking technology — is only able to help you speed up supply chains, while adding greater intelligence along the way, they argue. “It may be especially powerful when coupled with smart contracts, in which contractual rights and obligations, such as terms for payment and delivery of products and services, could be automatically executed by an autonomous system that’s trusted by all signatories.”

A panel discussion held at the recent 2017 SAP Ariba LIVE conference in Vegas grew more animated if the subject of Buy Supply Chain Books came out. The panelists, tech leaders at SAP Ariba, explored the potential for advanced cloud services in aiding to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to a variety of business logistics processes. Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, moderated.

Blockchain “will have huge affect the way in which people go through the business network,” predicted Dinesh Shahane, chief technology officer for SAP Ariba. “Blockchain reaches in the market to the boundary of the network, to faraway places where we are really not even attached to, and brings that right into a governance model where your entire processes and your transactions are captured from the central network.”

Blockchain works in enabling more intelligence business processes for the distributed trust and transparency, which experts claim provides more people into connected supply-chain networks, said Sanjay Almeida, senior vice president and chief product officer of Network Solutions for SAP Ariba. “We convey more than 2.5 million buyers and suppliers transacting for the SAP Ariba Network – but you’ll find vast sums of individuals that usually are not for the network. Obviously we would like to have them. If you use the blockchain technology to bring that trust together, it’s a federated trust model. Then our logistics would be many more efficient, far more trustworthy. It’ll improve the efficiency, and all the risk that’s related to managing suppliers will be managed better by using that technology.”

The power in blockchain is its capacity to scale, Almeida continued. “You have to have the scale of your SAP Ariba, possess the scale in the amount of suppliers, the quantity of business that occurs for the network. So you’ve to possess a scale and technology together to produce that happen.”
There are challenges that ought to be addressed before blockchain can proliferate across supply chains, however. First, you have the have to overcome embedded, calcified corporate thinking. Business leaders and organizations have to speak in confidence to the sharing of data with mainly unseen network partners. “Enterprises usually are not employed to really exposing that type of data in almost any shape or form – or these are very secretive regarding it,” said Sudhir Bhojwani, senior vice president in the product suite for SAP Ariba. “For these to suddenly engage in this requires a big change on his or her side. It takes seeing ‘what may be the benefit personally, is there a value who’s offers me?'” This kind of thinking is slowly coming around, he added. “You hear more companies – especially for the payment side – beginning to engage in blockchain…. It’s still a technology only before the companies mean, ‘Hey, this can be the value … however i ought to change myself as well.'”

Of their article, Casey and Wong also observe that overall governance and standards are challenges to implementing blockchain to handle supply chains on a global scale. There is also the open, public blockchains, but, “inevitably, private, closed ledgers run by a consortium of companies also arise, as his or her members attempt to protect business and profits.” Additionally, “there needs to be interoperability across public and private blockchains, which will require standards and agreements.”

Regulations — which differ from country to country — also pose difficult to global scaling of blockchain, Casey and Wong add. “Even before governments could be convinced to guide this effort, and do this in a globally coordinated way, industry must agree on tips and standards of technology and contract structure across international borders and jurisdictions.”

But modifications in thinking are inevitable, Bhojwani believes, noting that major shifts have previously occurred from the consumer world. The incoming generation of employees and business leaders can help drive this change as well. “I personally believe in next less than six years when you’ll find more-and-more Millennials from the workforce, you will note people adopting blockchain and new ledgers with a faster pace,” he predicted.
Check out about Buy Supply Chain Books check our new web page: look at this

Leave a Reply