Enterprise Blockchain — missing link in global supply chains in times of crisis
The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic is bringing new challenges to global logistics, stressing the whole chain from factories that are struggling to stay open, to the last mile delivery companies overwhelmed with online orders. In the recent years the world become increasingly reliant on functional global supply chains, where most of consumer goods are made on one side of the globe and sold on the other. Same holds for industrial supplies, to give just one example:
A modern car factory, such as Nissan in UK needs to be up and running 97% of time to stay competitive, allowing a few minutes of downtime per day, consuming 5m parts a day with the local stock good for half-a-day of production. Every missing container is a disaster.
In the world of pandemic every aspect of global logistics is stressed. Disruptions are wide-spread: orders cancelled, factories are working irregular hours, passenger flights are grounded and cannot ship the usual volumes of medical shipments, staff taking sick leaves or being quarantined, with the domino effect spreading all over the world.
On the same side, manufacturing and procurement of medical equipment and supplies needs to be ramped up in the modern, largely dysfunctional global economy. Contracts that were usually negotiated for months and years, are now taking minutes.
The remarkable example is the latest European run for ventilators, the only device that can save severe COVID-19 patients. The typical years-long procurement times, driven by tenders and planned hospital upgrades, are now shortened to minutes by heads of states directly calling manufacturers begging for some.
Many companies are trying to speed up the ventilator manufacturing process, making it ten to hundred times faster, propagating the stress up into the supply chain. All these developments are totally unprecedented in peace time.
When it comes to IT and computing support, the current crisis made the fundamental deficiency of the existing information technologies supporting global supply chains painfully clear. It is all too much dependent on isolated systems, widespread need for manual intervention, long lead times, and shuffling boxes and containers rather than individual items.
In a recent example, The Netherlands had purchased and distributed 1.3 million masks to cope with the immense acute shortage, half of which happened to be defective had to be collected back from hospital rooms. Disposable pieces of paper, that would be typically piled in a large container, they are now being examined piece by piece, with patients dying in the same room.
Enterprise Blockchain is often seen as the new foundation of global supply chain, able to withstand the crisis, with some global initiatives picking up, for example
TradeLens founded by global logistics players with nearly 200 partners and based on Hyperledger,
or
GS1, a non-profit leading development of modern business communication standards used by 1.5M companies worldwide, that endorses Enterprise Blockchain for supply chain traceability.
COVID-19 is a tsunami-sized wave of change threatening to overflow global logistics, and SoftServe can help clients to ride this wave.
- SoftServe has experience in using Hyperledger blockchain platforms to support delivery of emergency aid, ending up second in a global competition IBM Global Challenge
- SoftServe helps logistics software vendor Overhaul in adopting Enterprise Blockchain to track shipment conditions of medical or food supplies.
- SoftServe works with HerdX to adopt Blockchain into the core of global meat procurement technology operated in US, New Zealand, Japan, and globally.
SoftServe has certified specialists in key Enterprise Blockchain technologies and is there to help. Contact Andriy Shapochka, ashapoch@softserveinc.com, leader of Intelligent Enterprise blockchain practice at SoftServe Inc.
Authored by Borys Omelayenko and Andriy Shapochka.
