The Concatenation Integration Airplane pilot (Scrap) of the Auburn University RFID Lab in Alabama has published a proof-of-concept whitepaper that seeks to demonstrate the efficiency savings blockchain engineering science can unlock across the contemporary supply concatenation.

The proof-of-concept was designed to ingest, encode, distribute, and store serialized information from multiple points throughout the supply chain on Hyperledger Fabric.

The airplane pilot collected live data from brands Nike, PVH Corp., and Herman Kay, and major United States retailers Kohl's and Macy'due south.

Chip was launched in 2022 and claims to be the first supply chain project to integrate the information pulled from RFID tags onto a blockchain network.

Blockchain as a supply chain information solution

The project saw data pertaining to 223,036 goods uploaded to a distributed ledger. Only one% of data entries were uploaded by stores, with 87% of data coming from distribution centers, and the remaining 12% originating from a point of encoding.

As such, Bit determined that blockchain is a functional solution to issues of serialized data exchange within the supply chain. The written report concludes that the participating companies were "able to record transactions containing serialized data in a mutual language and share that data with their appropriate merchandise partners."

The paper identifies "a tremendous amount of error and inefficiency in currency supply systems," estimating that the emptying of counterfeiting and shrinkage in the supply chain could unlock $181 worth of business opportunities.

Traditional supply chain tracking technologies deemed "antiquated"

By contrast, the newspaper argues that previously existing networks for exchanging are built for "blowsy cyberspace technologies," and are non suitable to handle the massive volumes of serialized data that are generated throughout the contemporary supply chain.'

The squad points to the absence of "an constructive, manufacture-wide solution for exchanging serialized data betwixt business partners," despite the introduction of serialized data such as RFID tags and QR codes over a decade ago.

Further, the study argues that previous attempts to integrate infrastructure to collect data on masse' across the supply chain accept been "constrained by the industry-broad ineptitude for sharing serialized information."