Blockchain is quickly becoming a major value driver as businesses discover its advantages in terms of enhancing customers’ confidence in their brands.
Blockchain helps to enhance customer confidence in products by offering clear and trustworthy information about product provenance, ethical sourcing, responsible supply chain methods, and authenticity.
Abhishek Paul Choudhury, senior disruptive tech analyst at GlobalData, acknowledges that there is no straightforward way to monitor a product’s provenance and authenticity in today’s supply chain networks.
“Centralised systems are fundamentally insecure as they rely on centralised certificate authorities and centralized databases having single points of failure. Blockchain solutions, which are decentralized and immutable, enable product traceability and authenticity by tracking the products back to their origin and through the supply chain,” he added.
The Innovation Explorer database of GlobalData’s Disruptor Intelligence Centre highlights how blockchain ensures the authenticity of products thereby, improves trust, traceability, and transparency across key sectors.
Consumer
Hong Kong-based startup Diginex launched diginexLUMEN, a supply chain traceability solution that leverages blockchain to address environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. diginexLUMEN was created in collaboration with The Coca-Cola Company and British consumer products company Reckitt to help promote supply chain due diligence around working conditions.
Healthcare
Singapore-based medical services company Zuellig Pharma rolled out a blockchain-based tracking system eZTracker to control the use of expired, improperly kept, or counterfeit COVID-19 vaccines. It uses the SAP blockchain to gather, track, and trace various data points to improve supply chain transparency. eZTracker enables clients to instantaneously verify the provenance and authenticity of vaccinations via a mobile app.
Mining
UK-based diamond mining company De Beers introduced Tracr platform to track, record, and manage its diamond mining, production, and distribution operations globally. The platform combines various technologies including blockchain, AI, and IoT to provide provenance for diamond production. The company claims that Tracr is the world’s only distributed diamond blockchain that starts at the source and provides tamper-proof source assurance at scale to provide an immutable record of a diamond’s provenance.
Packaging
Dutch supply chain technology startup Circularise unveiled a blockchain-augmented information management system for sustainable packaging. It allows partners in the value chain to track and exchange environmental effect assessment indicators such as biomass, recycled raw material tracking and management, and life cycle assessment (LCA). Circularise aims to demonstrate how biomass and recycled raw materials can be used for food packaging while improving supply chain traceability.
Choudhury concludes: “Blockchain-augmented product authenticity innovations have the potential to generate enormous company value by lowering supply chain risk, boosting transparency, and improving operational efficiency and overall supply chain management. As the supply chain evolves, the technology will generate interesting use cases to make operations more resilient.”
