The role of blockchain in supply chains is increasing as companies realize its benefits. Two days ago we covered how the HHS department of the US government is working on a blockchain-based procurement portal.

Today, we’re learning that Siam Cement Group (SCG) — the biggest cement company of Thailand — is planning to increase the scope of blockchain in its procurement department. The company had already adopted blockchain for procurement a year ago.

This was revealed by SCG in an announcement on its official news site . The company had launched a ‘Procure-to-Pay’ portal managed by its Digital Ventures subsidiary a year ago. The portal was built over R3’s blockchain. A year later, launching it has turned out to be a great decision. The numbers speak for themselves.

Thanks To Blockchain: 50% Time Saved, 70% Money Saved

SCG said in its announcement that the portal launched last year has helped it reduce procurement time by half. Before its launch, the average procurement processing time in the company was 70 minutes. Today, it’s down to 35 minutes.

Plus, the cost of procurement has also been reduced by 70%.

Now, It’s Expansion Time!

Impressed by the results, SCG has now decided to expand the scope of its blockchain procurement portal to all of its partners in the next few years.

The company has thousands of partners across Asia, and at the moment only 240 of those partners are dealing with it through the new procurement portal. SCG now plans to extend the use of this portal to 2,400 partners by next year.

The company is also working on possible use cases of blockchain to improve its sales, collections and data analysis, it said. It will be interesting to see how they use this technology in these areas.