Blockchain and Smart Contracts, IBM Research - India - Projects
Blockchain for Supply Chain Finance
The Mahindra Group, one of the largest diversified multinational group of companies based in India is working IBM in the development of a Blockchain solution that has the potential to reinvent supply chain finance across India by enhancing security, transparency and operational processes.
Process delays in supply chain financing have a significant impact to overall business growth and sustainability. A simple financing scenario consists of financier, supplier, OEM, and logistics provider. The main challenges are:
- Difficult to obtain consistent view of status across all the entities (and hence lack of trust)
- Undertaking by Supplier not to submit invoice to two banks is the only mechanism to avoid double-spend
- Prone to errors during certain manual steps
- Requires multiple costly, ad-hoc point-to-point integration for automation of processes between Suppliers, Financier, and OEMs
- Recovery or refund due to product returns is expensive
The process lead time is 7 – 30 days and is enhanced with additional players like assemblers where the charges and products are shipped to different organizations. Our blockchain solution for supply chain finance reduces the lead time to few hours with the alleviation of fraud and operational risks.
Cross-Border Supply Chain Solution on Blockchain
IBM and Maersk have entered into a new collaboration to use blockchain technology to transform the global, cross-border supply chain. The solution envisions to track and manage the paper trail of tens of millions of shipping containers across the world. When adopted at scale, the solution has the potential to save the industry billions of dollars, while providing unprecedented end-to-end transparency and enabling highly secure sharing of information among trading partners.
The demo shows how the proposed solution can be used for shipping flowers. More details about the solution is available at:http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/51712.wss
Streamlining Trade Finance with Blockchain