INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY – ERASING THE WEAKNESSES OF VENDOR MANAGED INVENTORY

Technological advancements, such as machine learning or the concept of blockchain, have the potential to reshape entire branches of industry as a disruptive technology, but also offer the possibility to opti-mize existing processes. In this paper, we present a concept for vendor managed inventory relationships based on blockchain technology. Hence, we initially define necessary processes and transactions that highlight a special need for transparency and trust between the participants. We designed and developed a proof of concept that addresses the weaknesses of current VMI solutions by performing certain process steps in the blockchain. Thus, we implement a method based on smart contracts, which can interact with existing systems by using different data interfaces and therefore represents an application of Blockchain 3.0. The present work is intended to explain the concept to the reader and to support researchers for the future development of further industrial applications of the blockchain

Weighted Round Robin (WRR) Based Replenishment Model in Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) System

Vendor managed inventory (VMI) is a popular supply chain system where vendor or supplier take responsibility and decision in managing its customers’ inventory. Two important goals of the VMI are improving service level and maintaining inventory still low and available. Many studies in VMI compare their performance with the traditional system. Unfortunately, studies in improving VMI performance are rare. This work aims to improve VMI by implementing Weighted Round Robin (WRR), a popular scheduling model in computer system, in the replenishment model in VMI. WRR is popular because of its load balancing nature. Environment in this work is two-echelon supply chain. The vendor is a multi-product manufacturer. The customers are retailers. This WRR based replenishment model is then compared with two common replenishment models: (s, S) model and (r, Q) model. In this work, we observe two performance parameters: sales and inventory condition. Based on the simulation result, it is shown that the WRR model performs better than the existing (s, S) model and (r, Q) model and it occurs in most of the observed variables. In the certain condition, performance of the WRR model compared with the (s, S) model and the (r, Q) model is as follows. The WRR model performs 31 percent better than the (s, S) model and 12 percent better than the (r, Q) model in success ratio. Manufacturer’s stock in the WRR model is only 36 percent than in the (s, S) model and 40 percent than in the (r, Q) model. Total stock in the supply chain in the WRR model is only 63 percent than in the (s, S) model and 89 percent than in the (r, Q) model

Weighted Round Robin (WRR) Based Replenishment Model in Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) System

Vendor managed inventory (VMI) is a popular supply chain system where vendor or supplier take responsibility and decision in managing its customers’ inventory. Two important goals of the VMI are improving service level and maintaining inventory still low and available. Many studies in VMI compare their performance with the traditional system. Unfortunately, studies in improving VMI performance are rare. This work aims to improve VMI by implementing Weighted Round Robin (WRR), a popular scheduling model in computer system, in the replenishment model in VMI. WRR is popular because of its load balancing nature. Environment in this work is two-echelon supply chain. The vendor is a multi-product manufacturer. The customers are retailers. This WRR based replenishment model is then compared with two common replenishment models: (s, S) model and (r, Q) model. In this work, we observe two performance parameters: sales and inventory condition. Based on the simulation result, it is shown that the WRR model performs better than the existing (s, S) model and (r, Q) model and it occurs in most of the observed variables. In the certain condition, performance of the WRR model compared with the (s, S) model and the (r, Q) model is as follows. The WRR model performs 31 percent better than the (s, S) model and 12 percent better than the (r, Q) model in success ratio. Manufacturer’s stock in the WRR model is only 36 percent than in the (s, S) model and 40 percent than in the (r, Q) model. Total stock in the supply chain in the WRR model is only 63 percent than in the (s, S) model and 89 percent than in the (r, Q) model

An end-to-end bidirectional authentication system for pallet pooling management through blockchain internet of things (BIoT)

Pallet pooling is regarded as a sustainable and cost-effective measure for the industry, but it is challenging to advocate due to weak data and pallet authentication. In order to establish trust between end-users and pallet pooling services, the authors propose an end-to-end, bidirectional authentication system for transmitted data and pallets based on blockchain and internet-of-things (IoT) technologies. In addition, secure data authentication fosters the pallet authenticity in the whole supply chain network, which is achieved by considering the tag, location, and object-specific features. To evaluate the object-specific features, the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) approach is adopted to match key-points and descriptors between two pallet images. According to the case study, it is found that the proposed system provides a low bandwidth blocking rate and a high probability of restoring complete data payloads. Consequently, positive influences on end-user satisfaction, quality of service, operational errors, and pallet traceability are achieved through the deployment of the proposed system

A blockchain-IoT platform for the smart pallet pooling management

Pallet management as a backbone of logistics and supply chain activities is essential to supply chain parties, while a number of regulations, standards and operational constraints are considered in daily operations. In recent years, pallet pooling has been unconventionally advocated to manage pallets in a closed-loop system to enhance the sustainability and operational effectiveness, but pitfalls in terms of service reliability, quality compliance and pallet limitation when using a single service provider may occur. Therefore, this study incorporates a decentralisation mechanism into the pallet management to formulate a technological eco-system for pallet pooling, namely Pallet as a Service (PalletaaS), raised by the foundation of consortium blockchain and Internet of things (IoT). Consortium blockchain is regarded as the blockchain 3.0 to facilitate more industrial applications, except cryptocurrency, and the synergy of integrating a consortium blockchain and IoT is thus investigated. The corresponding layered architecture is proposed to structure the system deployment in the industry, in which the location-inventory-routing problem for pallet pooling is formulated. To demonstrate the values of this study, a case analysis to illustrate the human–computer interaction and pallet pooling operations is conducted. Overall, this study standardises the decentralised pallet management in the closed-loop mechanism, resulting in a constructive impact to sustainable development in the logistics industry

The enhanced model of hyperledger composer supply chain (hcsc) for the product environmental in supply chain networks

Blockchain technology has received growing attention over the years. Recently, many blockchain-based models have been proposed to improve the issues of poor visibility in supply chains. However, due to the expansions and complexity in the operations of supply chains in the last few years, poor visibility is still one of the major challenges that lower the performance of supply chains. Besides, the existing blockchain models have key limitations in the common visibility measurements properties (VMP): information sharing, traceability, and inventory visibility such as a lack of identifying products based on environmental attributes to identify the green products. Still, there is a need to eliminate the time consumption in the current traceability systems. Current models share basic inventory information including inventory level and demand forecasts. Model HCSC is one of the important blockchain-based models that addressed information sharing and traceability; however, it lacks a feature of identifying product environmental attributes to know the green products, lacks a fast batch tracking of product storage temperature and expired products, and lacks visibility of inventory with less inventory cost by modelling safety stock and reorder points. Thus, this study proposes a Hyperledger composer supply chain products orders Stock (HCSC-POS) model based on the HCSC model to share product environmental sustainability attributes to the blockchain network in the identification of green products to control the environmental impact of production and improve the environmental sustainability. The proposed model enhances traceability by fast batch tracking of the product storage temperature and expired products for fast identification and recalling defective orders to reduce time consumption in product recalls. Additionally, it enhances the visibility of inventory with less cost by modelling safety stock and reorder points. The development of the proposed model consists of three main steps: 1-Extending the HCSC data model, 2- Developing the enhancements of the Blockchain Hyperledger Composer framework, and 3-Testing the proposed enhancements in the Hyperledger Composer execution runtime environment. To evaluate the proposed model, experimental test scenarios were conducted to evaluate traceability and inventory visibility enhancements in terms of time effectiveness and efficiency using real industry data from the manufacturing industry. The results show accessibility and availability of product environmental sustainability attributes with “environmentally friendly product” labels in the blockchain network. The model enhances the traceability of batches with less consumption time of about 89.47% better than other existing models in time responsiveness. In the inventory visibility, model HCSC-POS efficiency in terms of inventory costs showed about 60.48% reduction which was better than other models. These results offer the supply chain industry a competitive advantage in terms of environmental sustainability, fast batch traceability, and increased inventory visibility with less inventory cost by modelling safety stock and reorder points. This end-to-end visibility helps in the accurate business decision-making process and improves supply chain performance

The Role of Blockchain in Enterprise Procurement

Disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, or the blockchain, have the potential to transform entire industries as previous publications have outlined. They especially offer new opportunities to improve existing processes in the dimensions of performance, cost, and quality. Despite a continuously growing number of contributions, research and practice lack an adequate understanding about how blockchain can be used to achieve these benefits. Against this backdrop, this paper presents the current state of blockchain research in the field of enterprise procurement and outlines several avenues for future research. Therefore, we define relevant processes and functions to build a research framework for structuring and categorizing the current body of literature. Our results suggest that previous work mostly focuses on blockchain application scenarios with a focus on communication and transaction, while widely neglecting numerous fields, such as data integrity and data access

Applications of Blockchain Technology in International Logistics - a Case Study

This work gives some insights about the beneficial impact that blockchain technology could have on the trust paradigm of modern supply chains, especially in the international logistics sector. The first two parts cover a non-technical but detailed description of how the Bitcoin protocol works and a deep dive on the possible applications of blockchain technology in the logistics industry. The third part is reserved for the Case Study, theorized with the help of Luxottica