Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Tracking and Risk Minimization Platform for Automotive Spare Parts

The client faces difficulties in ensuring transparency of the movement and provenance of automotive spare parts, leading to extended dispute resolution times (up to three weeks), high warranty costs, limited financial flexibility for suppliers, and concerns regarding the authenticity and confidentiality of shipping documents. Existing systems lack a unified view across all parties and are unable to support various file formats or role-based access controls for sensitive data.

A global automotive manufacturing conglomerate seeking to enhance its supply chain transparency and efficiency through innovative blockchain solutions.

• Reduce dispute resolution time for warranty claims from approximately three weeks to 2 days.
• Achieve a 7% reduction in warranty-related costs.
• Increase financial flexibility for spare parts suppliers by 3–5%.
• Enhance end-to-end supply process efficiency, decreasing man-hours from 380 to 59, representing a 6.4x improvement.
• Implement trust-enhancing features by providing data access to government agencies for shipment verification.
• Establish a transparent, single-source-of-truth supply chain platform support for multiple file formats (e.g., JPG, PNG, PDF).
• Enable role-based access control to safeguard sensitive documents and facilitate confidential data verification.

• Distributed timestamping to track parts as they move across the supply chain.
• Built upon a permissioned blockchain framework, such as Hyperledger Fabric, with a single communication channel among all parties.
• Integration of a distributed file storage system (e.g., IPFS) to handle diverse document formats like JPG, PNG, and PDF without requiring duplication across nodes.
• Implementation of role-based access control to restrict and verify access to sensitive documents (e.g., packing lists, bills of lading).
• Use of a customized identity management system (equivalent to Identity Mixer) to manage participant verification and document confidentiality.
• External certificate authority to generate cryptographic keys on user-side devices, preventing private key transfer and enhancing security.

• Government agency verification systems for shipment validation
• Supply chain management systems for data synchronization
• Financial systems for invoice processing and factoring opportunities

• The platform must support role-based access with strict confidentiality controls.
• Ensure data integrity and traceability with distributed timestamping.
• Design for scalability to accommodate increasing volume of transactions and documents.
• Achieve high system availability and fault tolerance within the chosen blockchain platform.
• Maintain a secure environment where private keys are generated on user-side devices and are non-transferable.

The implementation of the blockchain supply chain platform is projected to significantly improve operational efficiency, reducing dispute resolution time from weeks to days, decreasing warranty costs by approximately 7%, and increasing financial flexibility for suppliers by 3–5%. It will enhance transparency and trust across the supply chain, facilitate regulatory verification, and streamline document management, ultimately leading to a more resilient and efficient supply chain ecosystem.