Is Blockchain the Answer to Supply Chain Security?
Content was pulled from MHI Solutions Magazine Q3.2018
Three years ago, when Nick Vyas spoke at the University of Southern California’s Supply Chain Digital Transformation Hackathon, he asked the 300-member audience how many had ever heard of blockchain. “Just four hands went up,” recalled Vyas, assistant professor of clinical data sciences and operations at USC and author of an upcoming book on blockchain and the supply chain. “If I were to ask the same question now, I would venture to say that 99 percent of the hands would go up; in fact, half of them would say they are blockchain experts.”
As knowledge about blockchain has grown, so have expectations for its ability to solve many of the transparency and security issues for today’s supply chains. But are those expectations realistic?
“In the last two years we are seeing a blockchain craze,” said Vyas. “Blockchain has a lot of potential, but it is not one-size-fits all. It’s not capable of solving every problem we have in supply chain.”
Blockchain is a distributed ledger that records the history of business transactions in a secure, immutable way. Each time a member of a blockchain records a transaction, they add a block that only others in the chain can read but that no one can alter. If someone does try to change a record, the underlying consensus algorithm of the blockchain compares it to the other distributed copies of the record and rejects it, keeping the unaltered ledger in place.
