Blockchain - Samsung's Adoption to Track Their Global Supply Chain

Blockchain technology is changing the way many companies are going about their operations. Many companies are adopting the Bitcoin pioneered methodology of blockchain's open ledger transactions. Although this concept has been a big topic throughout this course, for those of you who are still struggling to understand the concept here is another quick video to help you grasp the concept.

 
Many major corporations are considering the use of blockchain technology to better manage various operations throughout their company. Samsung SDS the world's largest producer of smartphones and semiconductors believes blockchain technology will allow them to cut shipping costs by 20 percent. Song Kwang-woo, Vice President of Samsung, recently stated, "It will have an enormous impact on the supply chains of manufacturing industries... Blockchain is a core platform to fuel our digital transformation."

Samsung being South Korea's largest conglomerate was backed in by the South Korea government to implement blockchain technology nation wide to record their imports and exports. Samsung developed their own blockchain platform Nexledger over a year ago and implemented in May, 2017. Nexledger was tested on South Korea's shipping logistics companies, state-run research centers, and various government authorities over a 7 month period. Samsung released all of their research finding to the public and concluded it as complete success.

The findings were revolutionary for B2B shipping and logistics transactions. Traditionally in the shipping industry paperwork must travel back and forth between the shipper and where the cargo would be shipped to which takes time, trust, and human coordination. With the implementation of blockchain technology this whole process is automated reducing all of those factors significantly.

However, blockchain can be used further beyond just the facilitation of just the paperwork for shipping transactions. When shipping cargo such as produce, new blockchain ledgers better track data on the position, temperature, and humidity increasing the time and transparency of the cargo which reduces issues during shipment.

Now, over the next year Samsung expects to facilitate over 488,000 tons of just air cargo in the next year to provide the displays for the new Galaxy S9, Note 9, and iPhoneX. With the implementation of blockchain technology Samsung can more efficiently respond to shipments ramping up launch times of new devices to be in the hands of end users.

As an MIS and OM major the implementation of blockchain in logistics is very fascinating to me because I believe it will completely change the industry and way shipping operations are done.  Blockchain will change the way many organizations, governments, and institutions operate. To conclude my post I will leave you with what I think is the most eye opening statement that I came across. Gartner inc., an American research and advisory firm on IT related topics, predicts that by 2025 blockchain-related businesses will create over $176 billion of value.

I hope you learned a thing or two from my post feel free to comment, agree, or disagree with me!

Sources:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-15/samsung-jumps-on-blockchain-bandwagon-to-manage-its-supply-chain

https://www.ccn.com/samsung-electronics-turns-to-blockchain-to-manage-its-global-supply-chains/

https://www.ccn.com/samsung-sds-successfully-pilots-blockchain-tech-koreas-shipping-industry/