Blockchain in the Enterprise

The primary blockchain feature used here is Provenance, but its application has far reaching impact in tracking contaminated food, saving lives, cost saving related to re-call, and increasing customer loyalty. A single complaint of a consumer falling ill after consuming the fruit, could potentially put a blanket stop on sale of Mangoes across the country, what’s worse is it can take today up to 7 days to track the origin of the specific lot of mangoes. In the pilot-run that Walmart conducted, it took just 2.2 seconds as compared to 7 days, to trace the lot of mangoes in question. While this can help isolate the re-call, it will also enable to trace a specific limited set of consumers who are affected or may get affected.

Let’s look at another use case, counterfeiting. It is yet another issue that can be effectively addressed with supply chain implemented on a blockchain platform. At a high level, the solution typically requires a mechanism to write to the blockchain a unique hash signature – which is immutable – for each unit. Then with the aid of a mobile app it would provide each party in the supply chain including the end consumer, a mechanism to validate that the signature of the unit in hand is indeed registered on the blockchain, guaranteeing that the unit is authentic.

To cite and example, counterfeiting costs EU alone about Euro 60 billion and this is a global problem. There are three primary actors that are affected when a counterfeit unit of the product is sold unknown to the unsuspecting customer. First, the manufacturer/brand loses potential revenue coming in from a genuine buyer, second, the retailer (online or offline) may lose credibility and potentially be exposed to the risk of legal action, finally, the customer who is left holding the counterfeit product and goes through a bad experience of dealing with return. When referring to the customer, it is the genuine buyer who is indeed looking for an authentic product, there however are buyers who do buy counterfeit products with the full knowledge of the same. There is however a fourth entity which is the common link between the above three, and that entity is the logistics partner who transports the goods from manufacturer to the distributor to the retailer and in case of online sales even to the end customer. How would it be if the logistics partner offered anti-counterfeiting as a new value-added service? Here are a few potential ways in which revenues can be positively impacted. For example, a new revenue stream could get created, if they chose to charge for the service. Large manufacturers could make it mandatory for distributors to use the same logistic partner if they are using a different one, this will lead to additional revenue. The value-added service could potentially help gain larger market share. This is just an example/idea to help explain the concept revenue generation use cases when compared to cost reduction ones.

Enterprise blockchain Opportunity

Blockchain offers opportunities to enterprises, that can help them achieve transformative growth. The technology is nascent but evolving at a fast pace, and as months pass by is accelerating mostly to accommodate enterprise requirements of scalability, security and information privacy. Most organizations that are assessing the technology are conducting PoCs which is the right approach, but a more formal approach is required for evaluating the technology within the enterprise. Without a formal evaluation framework, it is difficult to calculate ROI of a final blockchain solution. One of the primary challenges related to blockchain solutions is coming up with an exhaustive business case that can list down costs, benefits and risks, and consequently makes the decisioning process difficult. While challenges in the technology are being tackled, it may be appropriate to keep an eye on how this technology moves ahead but be judicious before jumping into PoCs/Pilots.