Blockchain coming of age

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the May-June 2017 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

May-June 2017

Trust hasn’t always been an element in supplier relationships; all too often buyers have been encouraged to carry a big stick and get tough with suppliers to get the best price—no matter the cost. That approach to procurement is beginning to change.

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Two blue chip players in today’s global supply chain marketplace recently announced that they plan to introduce a “transformational” service designed to expedite ocean cargo shipping and mitigate supply chain risk.

Maersk, which has partnered with the Chinese e-commerce provider Alibaba, is now joining IBM in a widely celebrated effort to introduce blockchain technology to link supply chain managers, freight forwarders, other ocean carriers, ports and Customs authorities. The blockchain solution based on the Hyperledger Fabric and built by IBM and Maersk is designed to help manage and track the paper trail of tens of millions of shipping containers across the world by digitizing the supply chain process from end-to-end to enhance transparency and the highly secure sharing of information among trading partners. When adopted at-scale, the solution has the potential to save the industry billions of dollars, says Maersk.

“We expect this to not only reduce the cost of goods for consumers, but also make global trade more accessible to a much larger number of players from both emerging and developed countries,” says Ibrahim Gokcen, Maersk’s chief digital officer.

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