Heraclitus, a pioneer of wisdom in Greek philosophy, once said, “Change is the only constant in life”. Technology and innovation has been evolving ever since the commencement of the digital revolution in the late 1950s. In today’s world, there is an abundance of opportunities that people can cease and end up starting their own business ventures. Amongst this myriad number of technological innovations is a technology that is not only gaining awareness but is also yielding great success to modern technology startups, called Blockchain. This technology is not really well known in the industrial world today, however, those who have fully understood and implemented it have not only increased revenues and profits, but have also reduced costs which has resulted in an overall growth for their business.
Invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, the doubtful founder of the very-impactful technology, in 2008, Blockchain is a technology that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions without the involvement or interference of any third parties. In technical terms, Blockchain can be defined as a publically distributed set of digital records that is spread across a network. The reason behind the ubiquitous implementation of blockchain is due to the benefits and advantages that it provides.
Overall, there are three major benefits provided by this contemporary technology. Firstly, Blockchain provides greater transparency. The records of data stored in a blockchain are public and thus are viewable to the people who are part of the network that share that particular set of records. This coerces industries to produce legitimate data and to act with maximum integrity to grow and spread their business in their respective market. Secondly, Blockchain provides augmented efficiency. Because the set of records in a blockchain are public to the people in the network, the need for a middle-man or a third party is unsolicited.
The people who are part of the blockchain network can deem a transaction as either legitimate or illegitimate. If the transaction is legitimate then it takes place, otherwise it does not. Finally, Blockchain provides optimal security. Each record that is stored in a blockchain is highly encrypted with the help of intricate encryption algorithms. Furthermore, data once entered in the blockchain cannot be changed. This feature of blockchain, called immutability, makes the data entered tamper-proof; therefore, adding more security to the entire blockchain. Due to the above provided benefits, blockchain can be and has been implemented in a broad range of industries such as, the finance industry, the real-estate industry, the supply-chain industry, the healthcare industry, and so on.
A recent case study on Walmart is an epitome of the use of blockchain in the supply-chain industry. In the early days, Walmart was facing problems delivering quality products to its customers. They were facing high product return rates and had to pay out high amounts of refunds due to their products’ bad quality. Even with their best of efforts, Walmart was unable to determine the point of failure in the supply chain. The supply chain of Walmart was as follows: it started from farming to storage to transportation to processing and finally to the distribution center.
With the help of blockchain, the quality of the goods at each step was permanently recorded within a block. As a result, when a customer flagged a product as damaged, Walmart could now know where in the supply-chain process the product got damaged. This helped Walmart identify the problem areas and allowed them to fix it promptly. As a result, there was a drastic decrease in both the rate of product returns and the amount of refunds that had to be paid out. As a matter of fact, Paul Dyck, Vice President of Corporate Affairs, Walmart Inc., told BusinessLine: “We started piloting the use of blockchain for sourcing Mangoes in the US in 2017. We realized that in order to track where a particular mango came from, took us at least seven days. After using blockchain, we could track it to the farm in just 2 seconds”.
The use of blockchain can yield unprecedented business growth for not only well-established organizations, but also upcoming technology startups because, as mentioned above, it can be implemented in a variety of industries.
