Applying blockchain technologies for increasing supply chain resilience

Managing supply chains in globalized world brings many challenges for the responsible managers due to the increasing number of disruptions and uncertainty. Although many experts have been calling for increasing the resilience of supply chains, surveys show that the implementation of resilience strategies in companies is lacking behind. One of the reasons for this might be the lack of transparency and information sharing between different supply chain actors. Whereas information sharing might help to reduce uncertainty and improve supply chain visibility, the risk of revealing too much information and potential data leakages to competitors result in reluctance of the companies to share information. This chapter describes potential risks and problems related to information sharing and presents blockchain technology concepts as a possible solution for these problems. The chosen concepts, including smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation, are shortly introduced and their possible applications for quality management, planning tasks, tracking & tracing, and other areas are discussed.