The Benefits of Blockchain: Fact or Wishful Thinking?

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2018 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2018

If you frequent supply chain conferences, as I do, you’ve probably noticed that some of the best-attended sessions are the ones that focus on emerging technologies—or what we’re calling the NextGen Supply Chain. You may have noticed something else: While topics like Big Data, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain and robotics play to standing room audiences, there’s a lot of confusion about what to do with the information. At the 2016 APICS conference, one member of the audience asked a direct question at the end of an excellent session on Big Data by Hannah Kain, the CEO of Alom: “This sounds great. But there’s not a…

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Blockchain is the new buzzword in supply chain circles. Unfortunately, there are many examples of much-hyped innovations that promised to transform supply chains overnight, only to peter out or take much longer to gain traction than originally claimed.

Is blockchain technology any different? We are still early in the process of answering that question.

The level of interest and investment in this digital tracking technology suggests that it’s not going away any time soon. The financial community is probably the leader in blockchain tests, spending more than $1 billion so far.

Results from one of the more high-profile tests were released in late November. That’s when Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, blockchain startup Axoni and others concluded a six-month test of blockchain to track equity swaps contracts after they were executed. That means all amendments, deal terminations, stock splits and dividends were tracked by blockchain for those six months.

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