Sup­ply chain man­age­ment has a cen­tral posi­tion in the logis­tics indus­try. It gives an insight in the entire value-added process to pro­vide cus­tomers and mar­kets with prod­ucts, goods and ser­vices. For this rea­son, com­pa­nies must have an effi­cient sup­ply chain man­age­ment and con­tin­u­ously adapt it to the eco­nomic con­di­tions. Only in this way it is pos­si­ble to remain com­pet­i­tive in the long term.

The topic of com­pletely trans­par­ent sup­ply chains has gained immense impor­tance in recent years. Since the com­plex­ity of global sup­ply chains and the num­ber of goods to be trans­ported is increas­ing more and more, a con­tin­u­ous trans­parency within sup­ply chains has become one of the major busi­ness chal­lenges of this time.

Orga­ni­za­tions reg­u­larly have very lit­tle infor­ma­tion about the his­tory of a prod­uct, because the infor­ma­tion is stored on the servers of the indi­vid­ual sup­pli­ers and thus can­not be viewed. There­fore, this is referred to as a “rela­tion­ship of trust”. In this sce­nario, decen­tral­ized blockchain tech­nol­ogy is now used for trans­par­ent sup­ply chains.

On its basis, it is pos­si­ble to store all infor­ma­tion about a prod­uct and make it avail­able to every per­son involved. This cre­ates a “rela­tion­ship of trans­parency” in the sup­ply chain, which no longer requires the trust of the indi­vid­ual par­tic­i­pants in a sup­ply chain.