Blockchain-based Provenance Solution for Handcrafted Jewellery

Käsitsi tehtud ehete valmistamiseks kasutatakse tootmismasinate asemel inimeste kätetööd. Kui masinate poolt tehtud ehted on samasugused, odavad ja kergesti kättesaadavad, siis käsitsi valmistatud ehted on ainulaadsed ja küllaltki kallid. Seda eriti siis, kui tegemist on tuntud käsitöölise või disaineriga. Käesolev tehnoloogiaajastu on tõstnud tarbijate teadlikkust ning inimesed on valmis rohkem maksma tõestatud päritoluga toodete eest. Samuti soovivad tootjad oma töö eest saada tunnustatud ja omada selle õigusi. Praegused lahendused on pärituolu osas poolikud ning see võimaldab tarneahelal olla läbipaistmatu ning seetõttu kõrvale hiilida läbipaistvusest ning jälgitavusest. Seetõttu on hüppeliselt kasvanud võltstoodangu arv, mis toob kaasa majandusliku ja keskkondliku kahju, terviseriskid, valdkonna halva maine ning rikutud usalduse. Käesolev dissertatsioon vaatleb ja selgitab plokiahela tehnoloogial põhinevaid lahendusi ja võimalusi taustakontrolli tegemiseks ning teostab Ethereumi plokiahelal põhineva lahenduse käsitööehete päritolu kontrolliks. Uurimuse tulemus aitab kaasa taustakontrollimehhanismide arengule ning aitab seda rakendada ülemaailmse tarneahela läbispaistvamaks muutmisel.Handcrafted jewellery involves use of hand labour rather than manufacturing machinery. Unlike manufactured jewellery which is similarly crafted, cheap and easy to find, handcrafted jewellery tend to be uniquely crafted and fairly expensive, especially when it is attributed to a well known artisan or designer. The current information age has birthed a new era of conscious consumers who are willing to pay more for products with proven origins. Likewise, creators desire to be rightfully attributed and acknowledged for their work. However, the partial implementation of provenance by current solutions has encouraged opaque supply chains that hinder transparency and traceability. For this reason, there has been a rapid increase in counterfeit products, unprecedented economic loss, environmental degradation, health risks, increase in defamation cases, and broken trust. In this thesis, we review related provenance solutions using blockchain technology, identify key provenance features and implement a provenance solution for handcrafted jewellery on Ethereum blockchain. The output of this research can be used towards the development of provenance as a subject and its implementation in global supply chains

Two Esays on Trust in Supply Chain Management

In this dissertation, I propose that trust is an important yet under-studied concept in supply chain relationships both upstream in a Business-To-Business (B2B) context and downstream in a Business-To-Consumer (B2C) context. In the first essay, I investigate the evolution of trust in buyer-supplier relationships in a VMI setting. Supply chain management literature is rich in pointing to the benefits generated by collaborative supply chain arrangements, however recently the dark side of these collaborative relationships has been reported as well. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to bring in a new dimension - "length of the relationship" to these research models. Using survey data collected from distributors that use VMI, we find that longer relationships are associated with lower levels of distributor trust in the manufacturer. This erosion of trust over time is fully mediated by the distributors' experience of psychological contract violation. Our findings demonstrate that good inventory performance may not be sufficient to maintain trust in VMI relationships, but regular communication between parties, as well as nonverbal documented agreements, may also be needed to maintain trust. In the second part of the dissertation, I study the effectiveness of third-party trust seals that have emerged as a prominent mechanism to enhance trust in B2C online markets. Despite their common use by practitioners, systematic research studies of the effectiveness of trust signals are scarce. Exploiting a unique dataset of over a quarter million transactions across 493 online retailers, this study empirically measures the value and effectiveness of trust seals on the likelihood of purchase by shoppers. The dataset is collected from a randomized field experiment by a large trust seal provider, which enables us to infer the causal impacts of the presence of a trust seal. It is found that the presence of the online trust seal increases the odds of completion of purchase. I further find that online trust seals serve as partial substitutes for both shopper experience and seller size, which makes the seal more useful for first time visitors at a web site and also for smaller online retailers. Interestingly, the effect of the number of trust seals is subject to diminishing marginal returns, such that the presence of additional seals does not necessarily increase cart completion rates

Transparent, trustworthy and privacy-preserving supply chains

Over the years, supply chains have evolved from a few regional traders to globally complex chains of trade. Consequently, supply chain management systems have become heavily dependent on digitization for the purpose of data storage and traceability of goods. However, these traceability systems suffer from issues such as scattering of information across multiple silos and susceptibility of erroneous or modified data and thus are often unable to provide reliable information about a product. Due to propriety reasons, often end-to-end traceability is not available to the general consumer. The second issue is ensuring the credibility of the collated information about a product. The digital data may not be the true representation of the physical events which raises the issues of trusting the available information. If the source of digital data is not trustworthy, the provenance or traceability of a product becomes questionable. The third issue in supply chain management is a trade-off between the provenance information and protection of this data. The information is often associated with the identity of the contributing entity to ensure trust. However, the identity association makes it difficult to protect trade secrets such as shipments, pricing, and trade frequency of traders while simultaneously ensuring the provenance/traceability to the consumers. Our work aims to address above mentioned challenges related to traceability, trustworthiness and privacy. To support traceability and provenance, a consortium blockchain based framework, ProductChain, is proposed which provides an immutable audit trail of the supply chain events pertaining to the product and its origin. The framework also presents a sharded network model to meet the scalability needs of complex supply chains. Simulation results for our Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation show that query time for retrieving end-to-end traceability is of the order of a few milliseconds even when the information is collated from multiple regional blockchains. Next, to ensure the credibility of data from the supply chain entities, it is important to have an accountability mechanism which can penalise or reward the entities for their dishonest or honest contributions, respectively. We propose the TrustChain framework, which calculates a trust score for data contributing entities to the blockchain using multiple observations. These observations include feedback from interactions among supply chain entities, inputs from third party regulators and readings from IoT sensors. The integrated reputation system with blockchain, dynamically assigns trust and reputation scores to commodities and traders using smart contracts. A PoC implementation over Hyperledger Fabric shows that TrustChain incurs minimal overheads over a baseline. For protecting trade secrets while simultaneously ensuring traceability, PrivChain is proposed. PrivChain's framework allows traders to share computation or proofs in support of provenance and traceability claims rather than sharing the data itself. The framework also proposes an integrated incentive mechanism for traders providing such proofs. A PoC implementation on Hyperledger Fabric reveals a minimal overhead of using PrivChain as the data related computations are carried off-chain. Finally, we propose TradeChain which addresses the issue of preserving the privacy of identity related information with the blockchain data and gives greater access control to the data owners, i.e. traders. This framework decouples the identities of traders by managing two ledgers: one for managing decentralised identities and another for recording supply chain events. The information from both ledgers is then collated using access tokens provided by the data owners. In this way, they can dynamically control access to the blockchain data at a granular level. A PoC implementation is developed both on Hyperledger Indy and Fabric and we demonstrate minimal overheads for the different components of TradeChain

Supply chain coordination in the Canadian beef industry : assessing the opportunities and constraints

In recent years, the beef industry has been forced to examine improving supply chain coordination in order to respond to the declining consumer demand for beef. Exploring the different supply chain structures being used by beef industry participants to improve coordination and provide consumers with differentiated beef products is important. The problem is that it is not clear how the different attributes often included in branded beef programs affect transaction costs and result in the formation of particular supply chain structures. This thesis examines what makes a successful supply chain alliance in the beef industry. Essentially, this study examines the sustainability and effectiveness of different alliance types and their ability to coordinate various branded beef programs and the product attributes included under these programs. A predictive transaction cost model is developed, which examines how different product attributes result in the emergence of particular transaction characteristics. The model shows how the structure of the supply chain adapts in order to minimize the associated transaction costs. In order to better understand the relative importance of different transaction characteristics to supply chain participants, a two-part empirical study was conducted. In the first portion of the study the relative importance of key transaction characteristics to cow-calf operators was examined through the use of conjoint analysis. The results from the conjoint analysis indicate that certain transaction characteristics, namely asset specific investments, limit the willingness of cow-calf operators to participate in alliances due to the associated transaction costs. Cow-calf operators placed an emphasis on premiums, which shows that while they are willing to make trade-offs and accept increased costs, associated with asset specific investments and price uncertainty, they are only willing to do this when benefits are greater than costs. To further understand the importance of different transaction characteristics to supply chain participants, key managers and directors of different beef alliances throughout Canada and the United States were interviewed. Based on the interviews it appears that alliances have typically limited the level of asset specific investments required. Consequently, the degree of coordination is not affected to, any great extent, by the level of investments required. Instead, the degree of coordination appears to more a result of how an alliance is aligned with a particular brand name label. It appears that greater coordination occurs when an alliance owns a brand name label or is an exclusive supplier to a brand name label, as there is a higher risk of opportunistic behaviour and, as a result, higher transaction costs. The use of grid-based pricing systems and the number of buyers/sellers in the market did not appear to have a significant affect on the method of coordination chosen. Based on the results obtained from both the cow-calf operator conjoint-based analysis and interviews with alliance members this thesis identifies several critical success factors and challenges to improving coordination in the beef industry. Most significantly, when developing alliances it is necessary to understand the importance of different transaction characteristics to supply chain participants. This research demonstrates that supply chain participants in the beef industry are willing to make trade-offs between the benefits received from improved coordination and the transaction costs that arise, as long as the benefits exceeds the increase in costs

Analyzing changes in contractual practices in the Louisiana nursery industry

The flow of nursery products through the different market channels has changed over the past decade. As mass-merchandisers’ market share increased, buyers of nursery product imposed conditions on nursery growers in terms of their business practices as well as the presentation of the product itself. This study analyzed changes in contractual terms between buyer and sellers for two market channels; mass-merchandisers and garden centers. The items evaluated were that product information tags be applied, barcode stickers be applied, special containers be used, transportation to retailer be paid by the seller, returnable shipping equipment be supplied by the grower, on-time delivery be guaranteed by the grower, unsold merchandise be taken back by the grower, some minimum volume be supplied by the grower, and continuous inventory replenishment be used. Data were collected via mail using the Ornamental Horticulture Producer Survey, and non-respondents were contacted by telephone or additional mailings of the questionnaire. The resulting data were compiled and tabulated for the statistical analysis. A McNemar’s test was conducted to evaluate whether proportions of items required by the buyer to be included in the terms of a contract had changed from 1996 to 2001 within the two market channels. A model was designed for each of the aforementioned nine items to determine which business characteristics of the grower were associated with him/her accepting the terms imposed by the buyer, by market channel. Analysis of the dataset indicated that, over the time period of the study, more items were included in the terms of contract in 2001 than in 1996. New practices in the nursery industry appear to be led by mass-merchandisers, while the garden center channel follow suit. The level of technology, specifically Internet use, was found to be closely related to the inclusion or exclusion of items in the terms of contracting

Making assembly line in supply chain robust and secure using UHF RFID

This paper presents a block-chain enabled inkjet-printed ultrahigh frequency radiofrequency identification (UHF RFID) system for the supply chain management, traceability and authentication of hard to tag bottled consumer products containing fluids such as water, oil, juice, and wine. In this context, we propose a novel low-cost, compact inkjet-printed UHF RFID tag antenna design for liquid bottles, with 2.5 m read range improvement over existing designs along with robust performance on different liquid bottle products. The tag antenna is based on a nested slot-based configuration that achieves good impedance matching around high permittivity surfaces. The tag was designed and optimized using the characteristic mode analysis. Moreover, the proposed RFID tag was commercially tested for tagging and billing of liquid bottle products in a conveyer belt and smart refrigerator for automatic billing applications. With the help of block-chain based product tracking and a mobile application, we demonstrate a real-time, secure and smart supply chain process in which items can be monitored using the proposed RFID technology. We believe the standalone system presented in this paper can be deployed to create smart contracts that benefit both the suppliers and consumers through the development of trust. Furthermore, the proposed system will paves the way towards authentic and contact-less delivery of food, drinks and medicine in recent Corona virus pandemic