Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

ShipChain Earns our 13th Digital Innovation Award for Operations and Supply Chain

Posted by Mark Smith on Nov 17, 2020 2:00:00 AM

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcases advances in the productivity and potential of business applications, as well as technology that contributes significantly to improved efficiency and productivity in the processes and the performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and vendors that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations that advance business and IT.

1-Nov-16-2020-04-00-47-33-PMVentana Research has awarded ShipChain its 2020 Digital Innovation Award for Operations and Supply Chain. This award acknowledges the technology vendor that best exemplifies innovation in the technologies that support the operations or service and supply chain.

The challenges in the supply chain revolve around the efficient product flow from many points in the sourcing, manufacturing, warehousing, distribution and other stages that end with the actual buyer or consumer. In a global supply chain that depends on logistics and shipping markets, the lack of ubiquitous tracking and tracing systems demonstrates the opportunity to enhance accountability and timeliness. Information across an organization’s disparate systems is not readily available to analyze and act upon, which compounds the information management situation.

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To address this information gap and potential disconnect between the parties in a supply chain, organizations are embracing emerging technologies such as blockchain. Blockchain offers a distributed digital ledger that stores and shares transactions across an information network. As my colleague asserts, by 2022, one-quarter of all organizations will be using blockchain databases in production to improve intercompany business processes.

ShipChain is a logistics utility ecosystem that utilizes blockchain technology to increase visibility and improve efficiency in the supply chain and shipping industries. Using a distributed ledger technology, ShipChain provides a blockchain logistics system that includes trustless contract execution to shipments, providing no single point of failure and an end-to-end trace and track capability. The platform provides its SHIPToken as a utility token contract for powering and incentivizing transactions with the ability to load and maintain a registry of ongoing shipments that include the ability to provide ratings and a function for an open marketplace.

ShipChain was selected for its focused innovation on supply chain technology, meeting the modern requirements of organizations through its support of blockchain and its functions and methods across a distributed information network. ShipChain expanded its ability to consume and track products across the supply chain from supplier to buyer through its mobile application that is simple and easy to engage. The platform provides a unique and distributed processing approach that takes into consideration the sophistication of the data technologies across cloud computing and on-premises environments. Since the awarding of the Digital Innovation Award, ShipChain has announced Mainnet, which advances its portfolio of broader service capabilities to include ShipChain Web for viewing and tracking data, and ShipChain Profiles for sharing access to documents and data.

If you have not had a chance to assess ShipChain for your supply chain needs, the company and its products are well worth your time to evaluate. Congratulations ShipChain for your continued innovation.

Regards,

Mark Smith

Topics: Continuous Planning, Data, Digital Technology, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, blockchain, continuous supply chain

Mark Smith

Written by Mark Smith

Mark is responsible for the overall direction of Ventana Research and drives the global research agenda covering both business and technology areas. He defined the blueprint for Information Management and Performance Management as the linking together of people, processes, information and technology across organizations to drive effective results. Mark is an expert in technology for business from Performance Management, Business Intelligence, Analytics to Information Management across finance, operations and IT. Mark has held CMO, product development and research roles at companies such as SAP, META Group, Oracle and IRI Software. He has experience across major industries including banking, consumer products, food and beverage, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and retail and consumer services.