It’s naive to think an entire supply chain and all the companies involved would be able to integrate with a new supply chain software let alone blockchain technology all at once. The best we can hope for is a domino effect of integrations. One company takes the leap and starts tracking shipments, materials, supply chain transactions, or whatever that company decides is a good fit and will ultimately improve the way they do business. Once a single company is integrated and stable with a supply chain blockchain solution (most likely to be an extension of their supply chain software suite and not replacing anything) other companies in the supply chain can start using that data, they themself do not need to be on the blockchain yet. Once the second and third company are comfortable with the data and how everything works, they can then integrate. The key points here are that not all companies are going to jump at this opportunity at once, and those that do will need to persuade the others to do so as well through proof of benefits or in the very least the theory of an improved supply chain. Example improvements to a supply chain could be materials tracking and traceability, that would allow every company downstream from where the blockchain integrations is to benefit by being able to trace transactions back to their origins.

Here’s a scenario Company A and B do business, and Company B and C do business. Company A does not have any insight to the business transactions of B and C, and those transactions can directly impact the way A and B do business. Company C does not have the resources to integrate with company A directly so they are sort of stuck until they can figure out how directly link their systems.

The solution here is pretty simple, the middle Company B can start tracking all of their business transactions with Company C on the public blockchain. This will give Company A insight without needing to directly couple systems. When the time comes and Company C gets a development team, they can then add their side of the story on the chain, thus creating and extending the source of truth on chain until there’s a complete circular motion of blockchain transactions to support the tracking and tracing of any product in the supply chain without the need for direct coupling of business systems.

The implementation of a supply chain solution like this may not be as complicated as we are all thinking. There are widely used business and supply chain management software in place currently, the only thing that needs to happen now is for a company to create an extension or side processes to their current supply chain system on a public blockchain. It will most likely come either in the form of a native feature from these larger supply chain management systems or a 3rd party company offers a service or plug in.

There is still the concerns about the underlying blockchain technology, and if it’s viable for the amount of up front effort. These are good concerns to have and here at Atra Blockchain Services we are trying are best to illuminate the concern and allow business to focus on prototyping, building, and maintaining their solution while the blockchain layer is abstracted away. Atra customers will be able to create prototypes of solutions in minutes and hours rather than months or years on in house development. Customers will be able to tell if a solution is viable faster, and ultimately save time and money. Atra’s services come with user interfaces and no code is required to build applications. Try it for a day, or use it for a lifetime, pricing is based on usage. Atra does not assume that every business with a need to improve their supply chain will be doing it in the same manor, we assume they won’t. Atra allows companies to customize their solutions with our services. We give way to new types of companies, 3rd party companies that offer plugins and extensions built on our services that are helping them build and maintain on public blockchains such as Ethereum. Atra worries about the blockchain technology and breaking changes, customers only worry about the integration between Atra and their system, and we abstract blockchain and leave users with familiar web API’s and javascript SDK’s they are used to integrating with.

When you’re ready to take the leap into decentralization, give us a shout.

https://atra.io