A Fully Observable Supply Chain Management System Using Block Chain and IOT

The more traditional approach to supply chain has always been a web site that has been hosted on a server the company has to set up or get hosted from a provider. The supply chain data is centralized here, leaving the website the only gateway to the data, thus reducing the availability of data, increasing the risk factor, leading to an inflexible system where every update had to route to the hosted system. The orders, updates, changes, tracking details, and the details of customers, sellers, manufacturers of raw material, assemblers, and others have to be decentralized, that's the purpose of introducing traditional supply chain to the block chain. The decentralization of this data across different levels ranging from raw material manufacturer to the retailer will lead to a more flexible and transparent system. These traits would in turn result into a system where data flows faster than traditional centralized approach to supply chain management. Use of IOT ensures that there are no inconsistencies in the processes that are in-transit, automating the updating process that would other require human intervention.

I. Introduttion

Traditionalsupply chain systems[1],[2] are becoming legacy systems with the advent of technology. Use of Excel sheets to update data of the current stage in the supply chain have to be replaced by more automated systems requiring less human intervention. Automation itself calls for a system that stores and manages data with the least possible use of human hand. The current systems involved in supply chain management are in fact web sites hosted on company servers that hold the key data relating to the recent and present undergoing processes of each stage of the supply chain. People working in different stages have to use the same website portal to update or fill in data that would complete the metadata of the process. This can be backed by an example of a manufacturer's intranet application that reserves a spot for people to update data in different sectors like raw material influx to the export to retailers. All the data mentioned above flows to and from one single server and data archive that exists in the company's hands. The centralized server and the intranet applications depending on them are localized possessions of that company only. The company is just one of the large number of nodes, the supply chain tree has. And a centralized intranet application[3] pertaining to a particular company and what it does is the point of discontinuity of the supply chain. Fig. 1