Application of Smart Contracts in Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Traditional supply chain management systems can struggle with issues such as traceability, transparency and trust between supply chain participants. In order to mitigate such issues, we propose application of blockchain technology and smart contracts. This paper presents a working supply chain model based on the Ethereum blockchain network. Ganache, a personal Ethereum blockchain, was used to deploy contracts, and TruffleSuite was used as a development environment. Although participants in the supply chain are simplified in comparison to real world scenarios, the presented model allows us to demonstrate how application of blockchain and smart contracts can improve mentioned issues characteristic for traditional supply chains. Detailed process flow of such a supply management system was given, and used system structures were described in detail. Described model proves that it is possible to apply smart contracts in order to solve problems of traceability transparency and trust in a simple and reliable way.