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hese days a blockchain system has the capacity to encompass many more types of information management requirements than just a cash exchange. Largely, due to its enhanced trust and transparency characteristics, a blockchain has the capability to improve trading relationships by expediting all kinds of business administration processes on multiple systems across multiple domains. This can also streamline operations and enable the reapportionment of costly administration resources; and other exulted benefits claim to address some of the heavy regulatory, governance, risk, and compliance burdens by enabling higher levels of security vigilance, verification, and veracity. That’s an impressive list for something that is, conceptually, quite simply a secure record of digitised data. There’s yet more to it too. By further digitising and recording transactional data activities in a securely shared environment, a blockchain can significantly reduce audit and dispute costs and enable improved production quality assurance. To put that into some context, blockchain can aid industries that use supply chains, offer detailed and accurate logging for the intricate legal environment, as well as bring heightened levels of security to financial and health industry data transactions – to name just a few use cases. Blockchain records WAYNE ‘blocks’ of information imLLOYD mutably, and it’s the seSMARTER curity element that holds CONTRACTS the most weight in conversations surrounding this relatively new technological kid on the block. Each piece of data that enters the ledger (for example, an invoice, a shipping order, a legal document, an actual financial transaction) contains proof of its origination, gets timestamped and is therefore locatable in a thread of a process that can only be accessed by approved parties. With that in mind, we can start to look how blockchain for business can improve efficiency by enabling such immutable accuracy.
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BLOCKCHAIN FOR BUSINESS BENEFIT While most of the early adopters of this emerging data logging technology have tended to be large and complex organisations with vast trading networks and multi-tiered channels, Wayne Lloyd, CEO of Smarter Contracts believes that blockchains will transform many back office systems and processes into front and centre technologies and opportunities. In doing so, companies will be able to create new, more immersive and relevant digital experiences for their customers, ultimately changing the way they do business. “Today we have wine companies that have used the technology to track production from the grape to the bottle so customers can understand how much carbon was emitted in order to make the product, “ explained Lloyd. Another example that he highlighted in conversation with ERP Today is how China’s largest car brand BYD is using VeChain technology to track how responsible customers are at driving their blockchain-based electric cars (e.g. for carbon emission imbalances). “These new data points will provide BYD with untold opportunities to interact with their customers and their partners, giving them a huge competitive advantage over those companies that choose to ignore its potential,” he said. However Lloyd also said that the traction regarding blockchain take-up will not be that fast due to the limited amount of people, relatively speaking, that understand the technology; and to code it that pool is even smaller. He said: “I speak with many business owners and it is unfortunate that many still base the opportunities of blockchain technology on the perceived limitations of Bitcoin, whilst others haven’t even heard of it at all.” He goes so far as to say that the companies which are not seeking to grasp the potential of blockchain in their business run the risk of becoming as irrelevant as those that chose to ignore the internet in the 1990s.
