Walmart on blockchain

We all know Walmart. It’s the place where even people trapped in a hostage situation will deny that they were shopping there. It’s also the largest company by revenue and by number of employees — and it has reported another successful year.

Walmart is rarely mentioned as an innovator. Usually, the glory for that goes to its rival Amazon. But Walmart has grown into a global behemoth by mastering logistics on a large scale. It has built over 10,500 locations since 1962. And it’s not stopping: while the world is focused on bitcoin and Ether and NFTs and Metaverse, Walmart decided to use the underlying blockchain technology to solve a big business problem.

In a pilot running in Canada, the objective is to automate processes for handling invoices and payments of its 70 third-party freight carriers. If there is one industry still run by paper and faxes, tracking is an example of it. Many startups have tried to solve various parts of the chain. But because there are so many independent companies involved, it is almost impossible to change anything. This is where Walmart has the clout to change things.

According to Walmart Canada’s research, 70% of all invoices required reconciliation. The amount of manual effort needed to make that happen, along with delayed payments resulted in unhappy suppliers and unnecessary costs. What was the cause of these issues? Too…