Last week, we completed the biggest implementation we’ve ever done on the blockchain technology. During the development of this large-scale blockchain product, we learnt a couple of thing, and eventually patched some issues with Hyperledger Fabric as well.
Out of all the many products we’ve built and delivered for the supply chain industry, this particular one was special for us, for a couple of reasons:
- The current supply chain management is way too complex with 25+ steps to get a shipping done.
- The variations in which the goods will be transferred is at scale with over 5000 artifacts, each with unique contracts and guarantees
These two major complexities interested us to take the challenge up, and here are a few things we understood about blockchain for inventory management.
Few things to know about the blockchain for inventory management
Before we talk about the lessons/learnings we had during the development of blockchain for inventory management, I would like to quickly run you through why blockchain matters for the supply chain industry.
The blockchain is not something simple. It is a technology which beautifully blends few powerful modules to get things done.
The major components of the blockchain include:
Consensus; these are also known as smart contracts. In our supply chain or inventory management context, this could be the payments, money or even the number of inventory in the system.
Provenance; this, is the context of a transaction. This is the module that verifies the ownership of an inventory using the blockchain technology in the system.
Immutability; the core of any blockchain based inventory management. This module prevents anyone in the chain to tamper any information.
Trustability; this helps the people in the chain to verify the validity of the inventory.
I already wrote about it earlier here , if you would like o read more about it.