Building a Transparent Supply Chain, with Blockchain https://hbr.org/2020/05/building-a-transparent-supply-chain
Led by companies such as Walmart and Procter & Gamble, considerable advancement in supply chain information sharing has taken place since the 1990s, thanks to the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, visibility remains a challenge in large supply chains involving complex transactions. To illustrate the limitations of the current world of financial-ledger entries and ERP systems, along with the potential benefits of a world of blockchain, let us describe a hypothetical scenario: a simple transaction involving a retailer that sources a product from a supplier, and a bank that provides the working capital the supplier needs to fill the order. The transaction involves information flows, inventory flows, and financial flows. Note that a given flow does not result in financial-ledger entries at all three parties involved. And state-of-the-art ERP systems, manual audits, and inspections can’t reliably connect the three flows, which makes it hard to eliminate execution errors, improve decision-making, and resolve supply chain conflicts.