MHI Solutions Improving Supply Chain Performance
Certified track and trace using blockchain or other emerging technologies—is there an actual case for this in the next three years?
A growing number of experts are certainly bullish on the prospects, and there is movement among the manufacturing and retail industries to explore how to best leverage such technologies for use within their own supply chains.
“Track and trace is intended to authenticate products that they are actually what they are supposed to be, by determining their origin and their movement through the supply chain,” says Rick Fox, chairman of MHI’s Order Fulfillment Solutions Committee. “These issues are important, for example, in the food and drug industry supply chains, where there can be food products that are poisonous or counterfeit drugs.”
Fox, president and chief executive of MHI member FOX IV Technologies Inc., is also a member of the barcode technology group, BCID-TG, for GS1.
Blockchain—the underlying technology under bitcoin—may be the hottest new technology being explored by other industries. According to Wikipedia, a blockchain is a permissionless distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of transactional data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by operators of the data store’s nodes.
By Katie Kuehner-Hebert