Today, almost every company can relate to the benefits that blockchain technology can bring, especially in the supply chain realm. There has been a drastic shift in the Blockchain from it being the driving force behind crypto currency to emerge as an underlying structure for solution development. The emerging tech AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) blockchain has become a buzzword today.

Currently, manufacturing going through the toil of inefficient, slow and costly supply chains. The global service expectations too are creating higher benchmarks in terms of quality standards and time demands led by competition and exponential technological advancements.

Talking about how the emerging tech is recontouring the Indian manufacturing landscape, Global Chief Supply Chain and Technology Officer at PGP Glass, Samit Datta said that in order to make money, one needs to build absolute transparency. It comes by building processes, having cultures, having people on-board and several other elements. One of the factors that have been there is technology.

“The whole onus is of course to make money, however, it needs to be taken care of that you are viewed as a trustworthy supplier.” Said Datta.

One needs to be consistent and reliable in order to achieve a transparent supply chain management. People simply do not like variations and trust builds on the basis of consistency, he added.

With lakhs of troops, vehicles, equipment and individuals whose healthcare has to be taken care across the borders around and within the country, military’s supply chain works in a different way. Commercial logistics is cost-based whereas military logistics is need-based.

Brigadier Vinod Batra, Advisor to Business Access Partners said, “The scale at which we operate is much larger than any other commercial organisation operates and our supply chain is very complex.”

In military logistics failure is not an option, hence we need to have a very robust system and adequate redundancy in our assistance in order to fulfil our advanced requirements. We have a yearly budget of around 5.5 lakhs crore and the procurement counts to Rs 2 lakh crore a year, he added.

Also, while speaking about how secrecy and transparency go along, he said that secrecy is from our operational point of view in order to keep it undisclosed for the opponent. We would not like to be transparent to our opponents.

According to the Director and CEO of GenEx Logistics India, Mansingh Jaswal, resiliency is likely to be a basic skill for every organisation in the time to come.

Relating to the brigadier he said that in the army cost may not be the constraint but in an organisation, cost is the only constraint. Cost along with transparency in various organisations would differ based on their products and services, they are offering.

He said, “All the trust, transparency and other related actions that a company takes is based on the decision it makes”

The use of transparency and traceability of the supply chains enables companies to be in a position to market themselves better and at times it can also be useful for them to introduce the need in a very contextual way.

Highlighting the Indian perspective of challenges in supply chain management, the co-founder and CEO, TraceX Technologies, Srivatsa Sreenivasrao said that technology like blockchain could connect all the dots and bring in all the stories that need to be heard in order to maintain the transparency and build trust among the consumers.

Quoting an example of a coffee company which is a startup, he said, “Anywhere, if one wants to build a comprehensive supply chain network it is very important to work closely with the network supply chain partners.”