Manufacturing The Future: Applying Blockchain To The Manufacturing Supply Chain

The success of a manufacturing supply chain is crucial to the success of its participants. Each participant is reliant on every other participant, but generally contracts only with those directly above or below it in the supply chain. This means the full nature and extent of the chain is often obscured, even to those that are a part of it.

Improving transparency and efficiency, as well as generating trust and confidence, is clearly in the mutual interest of the whole supply chain. But how can it be done?

The blockchain proposition

Blockchain proposes an alternative to the current system, where all parties in the supply chain work from one shared set of records. This shared record is achieved by way of a transparent, decentralised ledger of the transactions at each step of the supply chain, which can be viewed by any party that has been granted access. As an unbroken chain of individual, time-stamped blocks it acts as a single point of reference for all those with