Improve supply chain resiliency, traceability, and predictability with blockchain

“Many new technologies have transformed the supply chain industry over the years; however, persistent problems remained, such as lack of traceability, especially for raw materials, and a lack of trust in data across parties. Our team has applied a new blockchain-based solution to solve these and many other supply chain challenges across our cloud hardware supply chain. I am excited about what this new technology is already achieving, and even more excited about what it can achieve in the near future: delivering mine-to-datacenter traceability and significant ongoing cost savings. In this post, Yorke Rhodes explains our team’s blockchain implementation and why it holds unique potential for illuminating the supply chain.”—Cliff Henson, CVP, Capacity, Supply Chain & Provisioning

Microsoft’s cloud supply chain ensures Microsoft can deliver capacity more predictably and at scale to empower our customers to achieve more. The team oversees the entire supply chain process for our datacenters, which includes planning, sourcing, making, and deploying servers, storage, and networking gear as well as decommissioning them at end of life and managing customer capacity.

For decades, a lack of visibility, item-level traceability, and predictability has plagued supply chain operations, even for the companies with the most advanced supply chain management in the world. This leads to overspending, errors, risks of fraud, counterfeits, use of conflict minerals, and more. Microsoft’s blockchain platform is addressing those challenges, and has already uncovered tens of millions of dollars in hidden costs, improved end-to-end item level traceability, reduced cycle time, and expanded margins by digitizing items in a shared data structure.

Learn more about how you can improve your organization’s service resilience and profitability by planning and implementing a more resilient supply chain.