Ciclo di seminari dipartimentali a.a. 2018/19

Blockchain in Logistics and Supply Chain: designing real-world use cases by a Lean Business approach

Interviene: Guido Perboli (Politecnico di Torino)

The Blockchain technology can be defined as a distributed ledger database for recording transactions between parties verifiably and permanently. Blockchain emerged as a leading technology layer for financial applications. Nevertheless, in the past years, the attention of researchers and practitioners moved to the application of the Blockchain technologies to other domains. Recently, it represents the backbone of a new digital supply chain. Thanks to its capability of ensuring data immutability and public accessibility of data streams, Blockchain can increase the efficiency, reliability, and transparency of the overall supply chain, and optimize the inbound processes (Crainic et al., 2018; Gatteschi et al., 2018).

The literature concerning Blockchain in non-financial applications mainly focused on the technological part and the Business Process Modeling, lacking in terms of standard methodology for designing a strategy to develop and validate the overall Blockchain solution and integrate it in the Business Strategy (Perboli et al., 2018).

In this seminar, we show a first attempt to overcome this lack. First, we integrate the current literature filling the lack concerning the digital strategy, creating a standard methodology to design Blockchain technology use cases, which are not related to finance applications. Second, we present the results of a use case in the fresh food delivery, showing the critical aspects of implementing a Blockchain solution. Finally, we discuss how the Blockchain will help in reducing the logistics costs and in optimizing the operations and the research challenges.