Trust in companies is currently at an all-time low because of the constant pressure to lower costs in order to increase margins. To combat this, many companies are looking for ways to increase the level of trust their customers have in them. One way they’ve thought of doing this is by using technology to document the flow of goods through their supply chain.
Trust as a pain point
As a customer, a constant worry when making any purchase is that the good will be counterfeit, or not up to the standard one expects when making said purchase. Until now, companies had to rely on the strength of their brand to build this trust in their supply chain. When customers buy Armani clothes or Jimmy Choo shoes, they are assuming that the good is representative of what should be expected from the brand.
But what if there were another way to verify the quality of the end product without needing to make your customer blindly trust in your brand? The answer comes from the power of Blockchain technology to identify and track your goods through the entire supply chain. When you have multiple parties participating, such as the manufacturer, distributor, retailer and the consumer, it helps to have a digitized method of building consensus in a supply chain.
Your food is an asset too
Although not as valuable an “asset,” these ideas can also be applied in the context of food safety. Food safety has long been an issue in China, and this extends around the world. Contamination is a major worry as death or illness can result from improper handling of food. It is not always possible to verify the quality of the original goods and most of the current processes are executed by manpower, which can be tampered with.
For regulators, this makes things much easier to track and measure than any of the previously offered solutions. There would then be a method of tracking the status of each product in the supply chain and transactions could more easily be monitored. Companies will love this because they can measure the upstream and downstream effect of any modifications they make to their supply chain, and consumers will be grateful for a method by which they can establish a trust in the system.
How would this system work?
The general framework of the system would be to have information tracking occur all through the supply chain, which would then result in the recording of each transaction on the Blockchain by using rules or encryption methods. One of the key defining features of Blockchains is their ability to prevent data forgery using open and immutable protocols to store all the information.
In this specific use case, a commodity code would be established for each item, which would be stored as an encrypted string in a “one code, one item” method. Smartphones or sensor equipment would identify the commodity as it progressed through the supply chain, resulting in a transparent sharing process.
As a pain point to many different industries, the tracking and management of assets need a Blockchain solution that is robust and able to handle all manner of assets. ACChain has put together a protocol that works towards the efficient digitization of many different assets. Their goal is to help traditional businesses reconstruct the way in which they handle their production and marketing.
Once trust becomes a guarantee for a company, they don’t have to work as hard to market, and instead need to up their game in terms of production, since the consumer will be able to easily verify the quality of goods.
Conclusion
A token pre-sale is forthcoming for ACChain. Their end goal is to find ways to build trust in every supply chain. The distributed ledger which it will run upon will guarantee the safe information flow and asset flow tracking while keeping the whole process open and transparent.
From there, asset confirmation and transaction verification will be simple to handle. The end result will be a robust system for many companies to depend upon. Regulators and consumers will benefit from this system as well, and a major pain point in the economy will be settled.