Given the broad range of activities carried out in the supply chain, product traceability stands out as the core of any successful supply chain management plan. Traceability therefore is the planning and execution of activities which allows a person or an entity to monitor the pathway of a product from its origin down to the consummation of the product. This helps a company or an organization to be in control of all of the processes involved in a product’s lifecycle, it also increases transparency during the manufacturing phase of a product and thereby enhancing consumer trust.

Though traceability is critical in achieving success in any supply chain transaction. However, the effectiveness of this effort relies on the method by which it is carried out. In the past, and even up till now, various means have been utilized in carrying out the traceability activities in the supply chain, such as the use of RFID in product labelling and identification and manual register for recording transaction levels. Nonetheless, due to the diverse nature of the supply chain industry which cuts across various industries, these methods have not been wholly sufficient in achieving product traceability, and this has led to multiple product losses and recalls.

In this paper, we propose the use of blockchain as a means of means of improving the efficiency of traceability in the supply chain industry. By initiating the use of digital smart contracts in the blockchain as a technique to automate and track the path of a product within the supply chain, we are able to track the state of every transaction and produce an audit trail of the trace path of any product in a supply chain transaction. The result of this implementation is the elimination of certain human errors which occur during the creation of traceability logs and an optimized cost function of traceability in the supply chain industry.

Furthermore, we compared the time-length of writing a traceability transaction log, in a supply chain and error rate of transactions between blockchain, RFID and manual register, by using a waiting line simulation technique in MS Excel as basis for the choice of a tech solution in any traceability effort, the result of this comparison is that the blockchain technology has an optimized error rate of 0.00000% and a much lower time to complete a transaction trace log, and therefore we conclude the choice of blockchain is preferred as a technology solution to supply chain traceability.

Keywords: Supply chain, Blockchain, Traceability, Efforts, Technology, Smart Contracts,

Biographies:

Prof Anjali Awasthi is Associate Professor and Concordia University Research Chair (Tier-II) in Connected Sustainable Mobility Systems at Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering in Concordia University, Montreal. She received a PhD in industrial engineering and automation from INRIA Rocquencourt and University of Metz, France. Prior to Concordia, Dr. Awasthi worked at University of British Columbia and University of Laval where she was involved in several projects on industrial applications of operations research. In France, she was involved in many European projects aimed at improving urban mobility in cities, city logistics and on cybernetic transportation systems. Her areas of research are modeling and simulation, data mining, Information Technology and decision making, sustainable logistics planning, quality assurance in supply chain management and sustainable supply chain management. Dr. Awasthi has more than 10 years of industry and research experience in these areas and authored several journal and conference papers on these topics. She is currently serving as the Education Chair for CORS (Canadian Operations Research Society), is a senior member of ASQ (American Society for Quality), fellow of LSRC (Loyola Sustainability Research Center), and regular member of CIRRELT (Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur les Reseaux d'Entreprise, la Logistique et le Transport).

Mr Egbuonu Chinedu, is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University with his research interests in IoT Devices, Blockchain, Artificial Neural Network, Deep Learning and Software Engineering. Currently, he is working on the optimization of blockchain encryption algorithm using the Artificial Neural Networks model. Mr. Chinedu has a Masters degree in Engineering Management and Software Engineering respectively, and had his bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. He is a member of the Project Management Institute, USA.