How Smart Contracts Speed Up Demand Sensing and Fulfillment
Manish Grover & Rakesh Prasad, SCB Contributors
As consumer demand and buying patterns rapidly undergo changes in a digital economy, the supply chain that supports these emerging needs has to be both responsive and lean — and that’s a difficult balance to achieve.
The recent disruptions and demand-supply imbalances in healthcare due to the COVID-19 pandemic have further reinforced the need for a solution that allows all parties to be on the same page. The pandemic demonstrated that this need isn’t limited to retail alone, but is relevant to healthcare supply chains as well.
So where’s the most demand, what’s causing it, how can it be anticipated, and how can supplies be routed correctly?
The need for low-latency processes and information exchange is painfully apparent. Now throw in digital channel proliferation, with expectations of information and inventory being available on demand, and this quickly converts from a demand-supply problem to a real-time supply-chain visibility problem. The more we know, the more we want to know.
Emerging innovations in demand-sensing tools and frequent data sharing from retailers to suppliers and manufacturers have offered up new ways to meet these emerging demands. Now we need solutions that can bridge data islands across all sectors, to improve responsiveness while keeping costs of inventory down.
Can Smart Contracts and Blockchain Help?
Recently a new collaborative area of focus that emerged in the area of supply-chain provenance has promised the ability to track an item all the way from shelf to origin. A blockchain (a generic term we’ll use for distributed-ledger technology) based approach to provenance brings visibility to the end-to-end path that goods take. This capability was exactly what was needed during disasters such as the E-Coli outbreak in spinach, where the entire distribution was disrupted as the source of the problem was investigated. .... "
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