Innovation Through Collaboration: Applying Blockchain in a PoC

How It Began

A global corporation we worked with wanted to innovate and become a pioneer in their segment, but faced the common trouble of limited resources and expertise to bring their ideas to life. One of the ideas from their innovation team was to explore the potential of blockchain in their business.

Combining our own expertise in strategic innovation and the expertise of Blocksmith - our spin-off focused on blockchain, we dove deep into the core issues plaguing their current operations. Our goal was to deeply understand the main problems of their current operation and work on a proof of concept to validate a potential solution.

Our Approach

Our initial step involved working with the innovation team to understand the main challenges they faced in the business and identify the most relevant ones that could benefit from the advantages of blockchain.

Once we had good visibility of the potential candidates, we started our discovery process by deep diving into the supply chain, specifically their direct delivery process. We gathered critical insights from various stakeholders: customer care, warehouse team, marketing team, suppliers, and so on. This allowed us to understand the dynamics of the direct delivery process and pinpoint the main issues.

This collaborative effort led to the development of a proof of concept (PoC) that tested the viability of a solution to bring visibility to Direct Delivery Orders by leveraging the power of blockchain.

The Challenge at Hand

When a supplier was responsible for delivery, both our client and its customers lacked access to real-time status updates. Consequently, missed delivery dates and delays often went unnoticed until a customer complained, which led to dissatisfaction and strained relationships.

There was no system to track the delivery status of direct delivery orders. This was the perfect opportunity for us to take the lead, improve communication and service, and make a real impact on customer perception and happiness.

The PoC in Action

Having access to up-to-date delivery status allowed our client to proactively prevent issues and complaints by contacting suppliers when they missed delivery dates, which led to improving the overall customer experience.

By keeping track of supplier delivery history, estimates provided to customers regarding future deliveries could be improved, increasing accuracy and reliability in the long term.

The PoC focused on creating a platform to apply blockchain technologies to facilitate the record-keeping of order delivery status and its access from multiple stakeholders. The goal was to improve the post-ordering customer experience of direct delivery products from our client by providing a system to check the order delivery status.

Functionalities of the PoC included the following:

• Check Order Details: Suppliers and customers were able to verify product details, quantity, and delivery addresses with ease.
• Check Order Delivery Status: Suppliers submitted real-time updates, which then became accessible to our client and its customers, fostering accountability.
• Order Status Notifications: Customers received email notifications about their delivery status, while our client was alerted to any lack of updates, enabling proactive measures.

The role of blockchain in the platform was to provide a tamper-proof timeline of each order by saving the order id and status in a blockchain ledger to be accessible from multiple systems independently. At this stage, we also wanted to validate if a blockchain-enabled solution could be integrated into the existing supply chain with reasonable effort and impact on the process.

The Results

The implementation of this platform brought measurable improvements in efficiency:

• The customer care team responds to queries directly via the platform, significantly reducing the time spent per order.
• Suppliers proactively contact customers for delivery information, slashing the latency from 48 hours to only 5 minutes.

We estimated that each order saw a reduction of at least one hour of work, and the communication lag was virtually eliminated—from 48 hours to five minutes.

Conclusion

This PoC not only met our own expectations but exceeded them, providing a huge leap forward in our client’s direct delivery operations.

It laid the groundwork for a scalable solution that could evolve towards a future global and open platform of direct delivery, where suppliers, distributors, and carriers could cooperate. Such a market-making platform could become a significant service-based revenue stream for our client, with substantial synergies and value added to them and their current partners, present and future. It also proved to be a perfect opportunity to strategically leverage blockchain technology to create new markets and business models.

If you’re in need for an innovative solution and wonder how current technologies can be leveraged for your benefit, reach out! We are always staying on top of new things and applying current solutions to what we do for our Clients.