Your Supply Chain's Surprising New Role: Building Customer Trust

Customer trust is up for grabs. Amid a seemingly endless parade of data privacy leaks, social media misinformation, and clever counterfeiting of everything from footwear to pharmaceuticals, consumers are searching for brands and businesses they can believe in. For many, that trust begins at a foundational level: the ironclad con­ dence that the product they have received is precisely the product they agreed to purchase. For some consumers, this might mean the comfortable assurance that their co‑ ee was sourced from fair trade suppliers, that their lettuce is safe to eat, or that their new golf clubs are not counterfeit. For manufacturers, it might mean the sure knowledge that a key raw material was acquired in full compliance with global trade regulations— backed by the documentation to prove it. Today’s complex global supply networks have made this a high bar, requiring that companies be able to understand and document exactly where, how and by whom every component, subcomponent and raw material in their products has been sourced, altered and transported—right through to ­nal delivery. While supply chains have improved over the past few decades, their controls have not yet evolved to provide this level of visibility, or to accommodate today’s increasingly customer-centric business models. Enter blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that can be used to create an immutable record of provenance. Requiring in many cases a surprisingly modest investment, and able in most