Although data-driven decision-making has gained significance and importance in the age of big data, this does not mean that everything always goes as planned, for businesses and consumers alike.
Without a doubt, business intelligence technologies are capable of filtering, sorting, analyzing, and interpreting the reams of data created everyday. However, business intelligence tools are only as successful as the data structure upon which they are built. For businesses that have mountains of unstructured data, obtaining insights from this mountain of data needs a great deal of effort and time. Meanwhile, end consumers are increasingly concerned about the source of raw materials and the provenance of products.
Given these disparate but highly interconnected requirements, the need of data collection and making it freely accessible takes on additional significance in the digital age. Taking these considerations into account, blockchain technology provides a robust architecture that meets these objectives.
Adding A Trust Layer To Data
Technology is critical for maximizing the value of data, and businesses that sell to other businesses and consumers stand to gain significantly from its application to decision-making. Due to blockchain’s inherent tracking capabilities and inbuilt ledger, this application is new, as it ensures that data appended to the blockchain is confirmed and cannot be modified in the future (immutable).
Harnessing all of this data in a visible and accessible way creates tremendous efficiencies for firms with diverse production processes, sourcing requirements, and data-driven departments. Additionally, it establishes a tamper-proof chain of unbreakable information, enhancing trust in the underlying data’s legitimacy.
According to Authtrail, the answer to increased data monitoring capabilities is to leverage blockchain technology. Authtrail’s digital product passport (DPP) follows items through every stage of the manufacturing process or production lifecycle, providing businesses and consumers with unprecedented visibility into end-to-end operations.
For a firm like IBO, which includes aerospace and defense corporations among its clients, product end users must understand how raw materials are sourced, product requirements, and, most crucially, how to check authenticity in order to ensure products fulfill high quality control standards. However, IBO’s newly discovered transparency is only one of a plethora of potential applications for this type of blockchain-based technology.
Improved data integrity opens up new opportunity for businesses to assess processes in order to identify potential for improvement, optimization, and risk reduction. Consider the case when a manufacturing process is discovered to be defective and unreliable as a result of testing data. Not only can a business take proactive steps to ensure that all items that went through the process are extensively inspected to verify they meet specified quality standards, but they can also avoid undesired recalls that undermine their reputation and customer trust.
Authtrail’s QR tags enable the creation of more detailed information on a product, all the way down to the raw material’s initial origins. However, because all new information associated with each tag is automatically published to the blockchain when scanned, every single component of a product can be traced from a single location. Apart from the productivity improvements associated with a densely connected ecosystem, this data is easily shareable in an organized way.
For firms where quality control and regulatory compliance are critical, this increased visibility can pay rewards in a variety of ways, including cost savings, identifying opportunities for process risk reduction, and simply sharing data with authorities. However, corporations are not the only ones who benefit from this greater transparency and data validation. Additionally, consumers have a greater opportunity to obtain useful information about products and their sources.
Transparency Improves Relationships
While it’s easy to understand the business benefits of blockchain adoption, consumers are also a factor. With rising customer demand for knowledge about product sourcing, the origin of raw materials, and the integrity of completed products, publicly available manufacturer data is critical for improving the relationship with end consumers.
For starters, the time it takes a manufacturer or distributor to retrieve this information on-demand when a consumer requests it can be significantly reduced, thanks to the scannable QR code that follows the full product lifecycle. Apart from its ability to reassure end users about the integrity of the data it contains, blockchain technology also provides a quantifiable way for customers to verify that they have received the genuine article and not a cheap knock-off. These characteristics add up to form reputation.
The ability to employ a digital product passport confers many benefits for makers of often counterfeited goods, not the least of which is verification. This cost-effective and efficient method of tracking products results in increased guarantees and trust for end customers. Additionally, because these QR codes are all unique and immutable, it is impossible for someone to make unauthorized changes to the data, further enhancing consumer protections.
Taken together, these inherent characteristics of blockchain technology can help businesses establish relationships with customers and business partners, laying the groundwork for future partnerships and providing a verifiable competitive advantage in competitive industry categories. Finally, trust is a function of transparency and validity, and the ledger structure of blockchain ensures data integrity, making it a formidable tool in the hands of all product lifecycle stakeholders.
This content is provided solely for informational reasons. It is not meant to serve as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other professional advice.
