Affordable and reliable supply chain visibility is becoming increasingly important as the complexity of the network underlying supply chains is becoming orders of magnitudes higher compared to a decade ago. Moreover, this increase in complexity is starting to reflect on the cost of goods and their availability to the consumers.

Optimising the physical distribution phase in supply chain by providing increased visibility to trading partners can directly reduce product cost. Current supply chain information systems often lack the ability to cost-effectively relay ground truth information in near real time to all stakeholders and most importantly to the supplier and the customer during the transport of the shipment. This thesis presents a solution that addresses this gap through a distributed architecture.

The solution enables small, medium and large businesses to interact in a dynamic and shipment-centric manner through a private blockchain subledger that digitises the transfer of custody for each shipment. Information in this private ledger is augmented by a public event ledger that reflects the movement of the shipment in real time.

The proposed framework is a cost-efficient and scalable solution for supply chain visibility. Even though the system is still in the prototype phase, it demonstrates the ability of the framework to deliver field information to all stakeholders in pseudo real-time. The blockchain technology is a current trend in supply chain system and the proposed architecture may offer a practical solution that
takes into consideration business requirement

To discover the full benefits of distributed blockchain for the supply industry, download this paper.