Building a Transparent Supply Chain, with Blockchain https://hbr.org/2020/05/building-a-transparent-supply-chain
Led by companies such as Walmart and Procter & Gamble, considerable advancement in supply chain information sharing has taken place since the 1990s, thanks to the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. However, visibility remains a challenge in large supply chains involving complex transactions. To illustrate the limitations of the current world of financial-ledger entries and ERP systems, along with the potential benefits of a world of blockchain, let us describe a hypothetical scenario: a simple transaction involving a retailer that sources a product from a supplier, and a bank that provides the working capital the supplier needs to fill the order. The transaction involves information flows, inventory flows, and financial flows. Note that a given flow does not result in financial-ledger entries at all three parties involved. And state-of-the-art ERP systems, manual audits, and inspections can’t reliably connect the three flows, which makes it hard to eliminate execution errors, improve decision-making, and resolve supply chain conflicts.
How to Turn a Supply Chain Platform into an Innovation Engine https://hbr.org/2022/07/how-to-turn-a-supply-chain-platform-into-an-innovation-engine
In early February 2020, when its home country of China was coping with the first wave of Covid-19, Haier Group, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of home appliances, faced a challenge and an opportunity. A customer—Heji Home, a Chinese home-furnishings company—asked Haier for help in producing mobile isolation wards that it wished to donate to a hospital in Wuhan, the site of the first outbreak of the novel coronavirus. These units required fresh-air, sterilization, and sewage-treatment systems that met stringent medical standards. Neither company had produced such equipment before, and neither had the design resources and supply chain capabilities necessary to go it alone. So they teamed up, and despite widespread lockdowns because of the pandemic and other business closings for the Chinese New Year, they managed to develop a working prototype of the unit and deliver it to the hospital in two weeks.
Digital Transformation Is Changing Supply Chain Relationships https://hbr.org/2022/07/digital-transformation-is-changing-supply-chain-relationships
One supply chain process that requires such interactions is collaborative forecasting informed by machine-learning-based algorithms, which use real-time information on buying patterns to identify new parameters that affect demand. To fully exploit these insights, companies need deeper interactions with upstream suppliers and customers downstream.