Empowering digital supply chain transformation by utilizing Industry 4.0, Smart Factories, Standards, Smart Contracts and Blockchains

Companies that place products onto the marketplace, whether they are internally manufactured or sourced from a supply chain, are often faced with ever increasing demands for data from a diverse set of stakeholders, requiring a multitude of different data reporting needs to be identified and requested from suppliers, ranging from: the identification of raw materials; number of products in WIP state within facilities; finished stock levels in storage; demand needs from customers; numerous what-if scenarios; exposure analysis; safe use and disposal instructions; through to obligatory reporting data under chemical regulation to identify the presence of any hazardous chemicals on finished products; through to the emerging Environmental, Social, and Governance data reporting needs in order to gain access to future sources of funding.

Blockchains are often mistakenly viewed as being solely related to recording transactional data related to some form of electronic payment mechanism. Smart contracts enable contracts between buyers and suppliers to create contract terms in an electronic manner and processed in an efficient and automated manner.

This paper contributes to existing literature by identifying a research gap in transforming the currently diverse manually intensive data collection tasks, via digital technologies such as supply chain collection of reporting tasks embedded into smart contracts, with digital data flows supporting IPC-CFX and IPC technical standards, recording data collection requests and responses in real-time within a blockchain, which is then verified by applicable supply chain actors, to ensure data consistency, accuracy and verification.

The proposed design enables companies to address existing state supply chain data collection tasks using as structured framework, enabling appropriate risks to be identified and managed accordingly in a more timely and consistent manner. The design may then be expanded in a consistent manner as new supply chain reporting needs arise.

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