How Dragonchain Blockchain Can Improve Supply Chain Management Services and Ensure Trust
Supply chain management utilizes a wide range of tools with the goal of coordinating all parts of the supply chain, from supplying raw materials to delivering products, to controlling associated business processes.
The intended goal is to minimize costs and prepare for all possible events and factors that might disrupt a supply chain. This includes managing potential conflicts between different parties within a supply chain’s ecosystem, such as partners and vendors.
One such conflict can occur between a company sales department and warehouse stakeholders, which may have different objectives. One party may want to hold more inventory to meet demand, while another may opt for less inventory to reduce holding costs.
The organizations that manage these different departments are incentivized to improve the trust and collaboration between supply chain participants, which in return improves inventory visibility and movement speed.
Dragonchain’s expert team and technology offerings can help buyers leveraging blockchain technology in addressing these challenges, and clear paths to even more intelligent data use. Here's how:
Traceability
Challenge
The ability to track and trace a product’s position on the supply chain is critical to business operations. Limited item visibility can result in over-ordering or, conversely, a shortage of product and the inability to meet demand. Delivery products late can lead to significant losses, especially in the case of perishable goods.
Solution
Dragonchain technology can directly assist supply chain management, providing traceability, data accuracy, and security throughout the supply chain process. A distributor that handles perishable items can use blockchain technology to create a secure, immutable and interactive supply chain application that streamlines business and reduces operating costs.
Every container can be issued a QR code that contains the associated details of the package. By scanning the QR code, a customer can connect directly to the producer and instantly receive information like when a coffee plant was grown, the provenance of specific coffee beans, and more. With the information being recorded on the blockchain, you can track every process within a supply chain system and have confidence in the fact that it has not been tampered with or falsified. Information on a blockchain cannot be modified or updated without network consensus, meaning that the validity of data is based on a cryptographic mathematical truth, as opposed to a centralized truth that can be subject to tampering and outside market forces. As a business owner using blockchain, you can now control an entire supply chain and can create a sustainable ecosystem with data that is trustless.
Validated Identity
Challenge
The growth of supply chain has been met with substantial implementation in agriculture, but is also seeing its share of issues, as with any new technology. As the amount of retrievable data continues to compile, it becomes increasingly important to separate the portions of that data that are actually of value to a business.
Solution
Dragonchain eliminates these issues through Dragon Factor, a self-managed, validated identity solution. Dragon Factor provides secure, decentralized authentication and access to blockchain applications. Unlike federated identity solutions, Dragon Factor gives users complete control of their data and who has permission to access, all without compromising on security and privacy.
Compliance with global privacy laws like GDPR requires solutions to respect data subject rights and data storage limitation principles. To help customers be compliant with GDPR, Dragon Factor can help:
- Comply with “requests to be forgotten” by allowing underlying sensitive data to be stored “off-chain”, while also maintaining a secure reference to said data with an obscured hash “on-chain”. This allows for sensitive data to be deleted or “forgotten”.
- Keep data private and ensure it never leaves a private blockchain unless access is explicitly granted.
- Determine where data will be stored, including the geographic region, and enable granular control over jurisdictions where nodes are operated.
- Filter access control to applications, thereby providing selective exposure of specific factors.
- Reduce liabilities tied to retaining PII or other sensitive data.
Through blockchain, supply chain participants can be incentivized to aid in the success of a supply chain ecosystem.
Provenance
Challenge
There are some potential blockchain users that treat it as just a digital ledger, a digitized record of whatever data is added by its members, with no ability to verify the accuracy of the underlying data itself. Because the truth of that data isn’t actually evaluated, there’s no aspect of blockchain technology that can prove an egg really is or isn’t cage-free or that a piece of lettuce is actually free of contamination.
Solution
By using a tokenized ecosystem, it is possible to create marketplace conditions that reward honest acting within a system through the use of incentives. Dragonchain can help you design an ecosystem around any desired outcome.
In the case of a food-based supply chain, you can support a customer that wishes to control or track their supply, production, or shipping. Their payment would be used to mint the tokens from which value and rewards are sourced. Margins can be considered and funds can be extracted after periods of audit without fraud.
Tokens can establish value in a number of ways, and support corporate sourced, open source and public economies. A portion of the funds are placed into a system, valued with guaranteed payout/exchange, retained at certain margins, and held for a certain expiration period. The value needed to incentivize reporting or other activity would of course depend on the system, industry, and outside economy. For example, if the system has international exposure, a reasonably small amount of value is enough to incentivize actors to find and report dishonesty.
Are you ready for blockchain supply chain management transformation?
If you are interested in starting your own supply chain solution with Dragonchain, contact us so we discuss our available plans.
