DC Velocity - Burris 2020

Jim McMahon is chief executive officer at corporate communications firm ZebraCom Inc.

DAVID SHILLINGFORD

Industry expert and leader in supply chain risk analytics, Resilience360

Resilience360 was developed in DHL’s Global Innovation Center and has since become an independent company receiving venture funding from Columbia Capital. The company is an innovative supply chain risk management software platform that helps businesses predict, assess, mitigate, and react to supply chain disruptions and delays. (www.

resilience360.com)

“Assessing blockchain from a risk management perspective is an important part of the blockchain paradigm.

“There are a number of different ways that blockchain
relates to supply chain risk. Ultimately, at the heart of it,
is having accurate supply chain visibility that you can trust
“This extends to the legality and paperwork associated
with product movement. When a container is moving
from point A to point B, specific financial transactions
cation. This permits financial transactions to be initiated
through smart contracts, which would be difficult to do
without blockchain.

“Today, the state of the art in supply chain risk management encompasses bringing together two sets of data. One relates to supply chain assets, which could be manufacturing locations or distribution centers or the shipments that are made between them. This, of course, is being mapped or tracked in real time in the system.

“But this is then overlaid with future risk indicators or information about an event that has happened that might be a disruption to the supply chain. These can include weather and geological disruptions, labor issues, political upheavals, anything that might disrupt the supply chain.

“This level of insight and analytics brings together
what a company’s supply chain looks like in real time,
ing to better evaluation and decision-making.”
and assets, managing the transactions across the value
chains, and making sure that everybody has visibility to
them is of critical importance. So for anybody involved in
global trade, lifecycle management of transactions, finan-
cial and insurance matters, and shipment and ports—
having shared visibility allows everybody to manage their
piece of the process more efficiently.

“I would say that the third biggest category would be dispute resolution for contracts, procurement, invoices, and payment, which today occupies a considerable amount of back-and-forth between companies to reach agreement. If we can agree to put our information on a shared database that we know is secure and we know is commissioned so that only the appropriate people can have access to this information, then I think this would be a huge advantage in eliminating disputes upfront.

“The fourth major use case category for blockchain in
the supply chain is identity management—streamlining
and securing that cumbersome process of qualifying, ver-
ifying, and onboarding a trusted entity, and the records
associated with that trusted entity. This is a capability
blockchain is really good at.

“Food, and its supply chain, is one of those areas where you really want to make blockchain an industry solution. Because having gaps in your information between the store that is selling [the food] and the farm that produced it means you really don’t have a solution. You need to have information of where it was grown, where it was shipped to, and if there was any kind of an aggregation point, where that was shipped to for packaging, and where it was shipped for distribution and then shipped to the stores. You want to make sure you can capture all of that information.