PRATUL SHEKHAR
Director Airfreight (Indian Sub-Continent), DSV Air & Sea Blockchain primary usage started in finance sector for maintaining encrypted ledger of transactions between sender and recipient with assurance of safety and track flow of data. Similarly taking same basic principle in future of DSC (digital supply chain) currently with so much digitisation under process at every stage, blockchain technology will ensure transaction safety / transparency and trust at various level of SCM. Blockchain technology along with DSC will integrate various intermediaries which will lead to minimising cost of governance, cost of interacting with various platform/organisation in supply chain ecosystem more accurately and in real time. Current challenge for blockchain technology is system integration at various level, which causes high investment cost. People still are unaware of potential benefit through information sharing at real-time.
With blockchain, the ledger is secured because each new block of transactions is linked back to previous blocks in a way that makes tampering practically impossible. As it is decentralised, it does not depend on any single entity (like a bank) for safekeeping. The nodes connected to the blockchain network get updated versions of the ledger as new transactions are made. The multiple copies of the ledger are the ‘truth’ about every transaction made so far in the blockchain. If we compare supply chain and blockchain together, we surely find that supply chain has become complicated. We can also use the term cumbersome because it takes days to make a payment between a manufacturer and a supplier, or a customer and a vendor. Contracts must be handled by lawyers and bankers, which means extra cost and delay. Products and parts are often hard to trace back to suppliers, making defects difficult to eliminate. Whether for industrial equipment, consumer goods, food products, or digital offerings, supply chains have headaches a-plenty.Friction in supply chain is a big problem. There are too many go-betweens. There is too much to-ing and fro-ing. The rise in uncertainty stops supply chains from working well. Suppliers, providers and clients must deal via central third-party entities, instead of directly with each other. Blockchain could be the answer to many of these issues. However, it goes much further than a hackproof way of holding and exchanging money. In-depth transformation of supply chains will not happen overnight. However, supply chains can already start using blockchain for small portions of their operations.