Using Blockchain to Ensure Supply Chain Traceability

Using Blockchain to Ensure Supply Chain Traceability

Pedro Azevedo, Jorge Vareda Gomes, Mario Romão
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-9151-5.ch016
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Abstract

Supply chains can span a huge number of countries, cross many borders, and require interoperation of a multitude of organizations. This vastness impacts business competitiveness since it adds complexity and can difficult securing traceability, chain of custody, and transparency. The authors propose that assuring chain of custody and traceability via blockchain allows organizations to demonstrate product provenance, integrity, and compliance. This work proposes that to effect true traceability the more complete approach is to connect both the supply chain actors (SCAs) and products identifications using digital certificates. A blockchain is used to manage the traceability of products and validation of the identities. Importing, verifying, and storing the certificates uses an off-chain data storage solution for products certificates. To create, validate the certificates, and setup the chain of trust, a public key infrastructure (PKI) was designed as part of the proposal. The results were architectural artifacts, including an Ethereum smart contract and a PKI-based certificate authentication system.
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1 Introduction

Blockchain (BC) is a recent technology that was first introduced with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency (Houben & Snyers 2018). However, BC technological capabilities are not only applicable to cryptocurrency and so it has been proposed to be used in other applications. According to Guo & Yu (2022) BC proposes to add several features to any application, namely: decentralization, autonomy, integrity, immutability, verification, fault-tolerance, anonymity, auditability, and transparency. Blockchain is proposed to be a viable method of tracking assets while guaranteeing security and data integrity (Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, et al., 2021). The benefits of blockchain-based tracing include the security of information sharing, real-time collection of product data, transparency, and visibility in the supply chain, as well as quality control throughout the entire lifecycle (Agrawal et., 2021). According to several authors most of these features seem to make a perfect fit to supply chains since they support the key basic objectives: quality, speed, dependability, cost and flexibility (Casey et al. 2017; Dinh et al., 2017; Kaur & Parashar, 2022).

1.1 Problem Relevance

For supply chain a recent duo of aspects: traceability and provenance have gained more importance. The focus on these aspects aims to allow the industries and customers dependent on supply chain to become assured of the products and processes sustainability (Kshetri 2018; Pal & Kant, 2019). While it is common nowadays for logistics operators to accurately track packages at the transportation stages, that type of granularity is either lost or many times not possible at all stages of the supply chains since they have become much more international, complex and interorganizational spanning (Kim et al. 2018).

From literature it is clear that the loss of traceability and provenance information the main factor that affects existing sustainability and compliance certification efforts making it crucial and the focus of research in the context of supply chains (Garcia-Torres et al., 2019). The traceability aspect additionally will also permit the optimization of supply chains which has always been one of the most preeminent topics for businesses as it highly influences a firm’s success (Kros et al. 2019). This traceability optimization aspect of the supply chain is then the main driving reason that has led some companies to make trials for Supply Chains using BC for traceability (Berg & Myllymaa, 2021; Wang et al. 2019). Examples are; Maersk – tracking global shipping, Alibaba – reduce food fraud, Lockheed Martin – improve cybersecurity, Everledger – implement diamonds and wine certificates, Walmart – monitor pork produce in China, Modum – safe drug delivery, Intel – track seafood supply chain, Bext360 – bring transparency into the coffee bean supply chain (Kshetri 2017).

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