Powering Industries with Blockchain

Healthcare: Many challenges faced by the Healthcare industry could be addressed by Blockchain. With many governments across the globe looking at nation-wide healthcare programs, a distributed database of patient information, insurance details, and medical records when accessible to healthcare providers, insurers, and patients would be highly valuable.

Other areas could be clinical trial data management, where many participating research institutions, industries, and hospitals can share data in a secured, transparent and trusted way.

Government: Governments can make use of Blockchain in many areas to bring speed, accuracy, transparency, and trust. The health care example above is one. Records management is another area where Governments can find immense use of Blockchain, this could include land records, vehicle registration records, citizen identity records and other such relevant details. Government agency processes that require data to be shared across various agencies will be another area that can experience benefits with the use of Blockchain.

Education and Academia: Verifying academic credentials is a universal need. Currently verifying academic credentials is largely a manual process (heavy on paper documentation and case-by-case checking). With Blockchain, verification procedures can be streamlined, thereby, reducing fraudulent claims of un-earned educational credits. Sony Global Education, for example, has developed a new educational platform in partnership with IBM that uses Blockchain to secure and share student records.

Supply Chain: Supply chains always involve multiple parties. Beyond suppliers and buyers, there are many parties involved in realising a supply chain transaction. These include Carrying and Forwarding agents, transporters, warehouses, taxation agencies and many more. A distributed ledger where each of these agencies can share the required set of documents will immensely reduce the lead time in supply chains and bring in great efficiency at reduced cost. This can also bring in increased visibility across the end-to-end supply chain, enabling everyone involved in the supply chain to see the state of goods in real time. IBM along with the Mahindra Group is reinventing supply chain finance with a Blockchain solution, which will enable Mahindra’s auto division suppliers to easily use their unpaid accounts receivable as collateral for a loan. The Blockchain, which provides perfect visibility into the entire credit process, is expected to provide suppliers faster access to credit while reducing Mahindra’s credit risk.

Manufacturing: Today manufacturing is a complex global operation for many companies. Many parts and components are manufactured in different parts of the world and the final product is assembled at different locations. It is necessary for many manufacturers (like automobile industry) to keep track of what component used in an assembly came from which factory and produced in which batch. A distributed Blockchain network across all manufacturing and assembling locations with shared data will make the traceability and tracking of components and assemblies a much easier and faster job.

IBM is partnering with several industry majors to build the first production-grade platforms for trade and supply chain. Last month, Maersk and IBM announced the intention to establish a joint venture to provide more efficient and secure methods for conducting global trade using Blockchain technology. This will bring the industry together on an open global trade digitization platform that will bring more transparency, visibility and reduced cost to the global trade. Similarly, IBM, Walmart and Nasdaq-listed Chinese retailer JD.com together with Tsinghua University National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies, collaborated and announced a Blockchain Food Safety Alliance to improve food tracking and safety in China which applies Blockchain technology for food traceability.

Successful adoption of Blockchain requires acceptance and willingness by all parties to participate in a distributed ledger network, and this generally requires a level of cultural change across the organisation.

To conclude, while Blockchain is still in its nascence from a wider adoption perspective, it has far reaching consequences in making our business networks fast, robust, trustworthy and transparent, bringing in tremendous amount of overall efficiency to complex networks.