How blockchain Tech Can be the Supply Chain’s Strongest Link

Shipping times from China, the world’s biggest exporter, are set to lengthen amid a new set of Covid quarantine mandates for vessel crews. The new rules mean that seafarers may have to spend as much as seven weeks in isolation for each return trip.

That latest blow to the logistics industry comes as the Covid pandemic appears to have gained renewed momentum, propelling a surge in demand for products as consumers around the world stay at home.

Adding to the bottleneck is an increase in U.S. manufacturing output to levels not seen since March 2019, which is likely to be augmented by President Joe Biden’s US$1 trillion infrastructure spending bill.

“There’s a lot happening in terms of supply, as we know — unprecedented volumes going on with demand currently,” Dennis Delgado, the co-founder and chief product officer of supply chain-focused blockchain firm SyncFab, told Forkast.News. “There’s a huge backlog in the industry.”

Watch Delgado’s full interview with Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau to learn more about the current supply chain crisis, how NFTs can be used in manufacturing, and how blockchain can help digitize legacy industries.

00:00 Introduction
01:47 Supply chain crisis
05:43 Blockchain in supply chains
12:23 Hesitancy blockchain adoption
15:51 Surging manufacturing output
18:42 Incentivizing legacy industries
22:18 Metaverse, NFTs, and SyncFab
24:14 Looking back and forward

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HIGHLIGHTS

Predict and prepare:
“We've been brought up in this Amazon Prime two-day shipping world where we want everything tomorrow or the next day. Realities are, things take time to make and produce. You can only have so much supply already at hand to be able to ship out at a (moment’s) notice. And what we're seeing is how we can increase some of that almost ‘preactive’ analytics and preactive supply shortages to figure out what we need before the shortages happen. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there that we're seeing in blockchain, as well as other new technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, where it can help us figure out those data points, those connections, to better prepare these companies for when those shortages are going to happen.”

Paper jams:
“Many of the organizations that we worked with in the past were still very much paper-based — paper invoices, paper drawing information, assembly information. All of that is still very manual. So I think with a lot of the early organizations that we brought on (the question) was really how we digitize a lot of that manual paperwork that has to get processed and then input it into our blockchain system, which definitely helped smooth a lot of the kind of day-to-day manual processes that have to go on.”

Connecting the parts:
“What we found out, through our experience working with different original equipment manufacturers and different industries over time, is that a lot of these organizations usually work in a very independent and siloed environment. And what I mean by that is that they're very closed up and preventative of sharing information with one another ... And I think (how) we see blockchain being able to add some advantages here is really creating that kind of trust layer between these entities to be able to share that information with one another securely, where it's currently not really happening in an efficient way.”

NFTs for IP:
“In SyncFab itself, we first got into non-fungible tokens back in 2017, 2018, and we were kind of interested in the intellectual property protection side. We're looking at the industries that we work with, the organizations in aerospace and defense. IP is a very sensitive topic. And the ownership of that IP and the parts information that gets exchanged between vendors and OEMs — how can you protect that? So that's what we were investigating. And we developed our own NFT within the platform, but we've since then moved to a more consumer-facing model, where we saw the art industry take off with it and really use NFTs in a different way.”

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