In a November 5 report from Business Insider, Coke One North America (CONA) – the technology company that manages the IT operations for the bottlers of the lemonade group – said it was using a blockchain solution to manage its supply chain. This solution is said to have been developed by the German software company SAP.
Management of 160,000 orders per day
The report further states that CONA manages a platform for monitoring multiple franchise companies that produce, fill and ship nearly 160,000 orders of Coca-Cola products every day. Andrei Semenov, senior manager at CONA, told business insiders:
“There are a number of transactions that are inefficient and cross-company and cross-party. They use intermediaries; they are very slow. And we think we can improve that and save some money.”
CONA wants to use the blockchain to reduce the duration of order coordination from 50 days to a few days. A cross-organizational, transparent distributed ledger provides real-time insights into the transactions of the various bottlers in the network. Over 21 billion US dollars in sales are achieved annually in this network.
Semenov explained how they had agreed on the amount and type of data that was considered necessary for the franchise companies:
“There was negotiation and discussion to reach an agreement on what data we want to share. We started with a huge list of data attributes and narrowed it down to a list that everyone agreed on.”
Known Names Use Blockchain
It has been reported that retail giant Walmart has long used IBM’s blockchain technology for a number of supply chain management systems. Recently, Walmart also used it to monitor its seafood imports from India.
Since 2016, Walmart has been working with IBM on a blockchain system to identify and recall food. Since then, the retail giant has also applied for several blockchain patents and carried out test runs. These include the monitoring of meat in China, delivery drones and raw foods. The company also plans to patent intelligent deliveries in the USA. It has also implemented VeChain’s Thor-Blockchain to monitor food on its supply chain in China.
In September of this year, several international coffee companies entered into a partnership with Farmer Connect. The partnership will use the IBM Food Trust platform to jointly develop an app that provides consumers with origin and price data for coffee products.