Digital supply chain management ecosystem powered by Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Most of the leading companies of the world are investing heavily in a computerized system to maintain their supply chain management. From collecting manufacturing equipment all the way to final delivery, products are being tracked by supply chain management software. Supply chain institutions also use their own separate software to maintain confidentiality. Despite this huge investment in digitizing the supply chain system, complete visibility of a product at any given time is not fully achieved. Quality issues, information mismatch, slow cash flow is still hampering the whole supply chain management and financing ecosystem. Companies involved in a supply chain maintain their own databases and the same information might get altered in different data storage or might as well contain redundant or missing information. This situation can create conflicts between parties involved in the supply chain. Thus protecting authentic information throughout the supply chain management still holds a huge challenge along with maintaining the quality of products. Knowing all the information in real-time such as location, ownership status, product status etc. within the involved parties is still not fully attained by the existing systems. As all parties of a supply chain system have their own standalone software, realtime communication amongst this software developed in different platforms using different technologies is not relatively feasible. By taking advantage of this situation, other illegal parties can inject counterfeit products in the supply chain. This can be a significant threat not only to the company’s revenue but also to its public image. In this paper, we propose a thoughtful framework to implement a unique decentralized ecosystem powered by the new emerging innovative technology called blockchain for the whole supply chain system.