Akihabara News (Tokyo) — KPMG Origins, a joint Japan, China, and Australia project, is a blockchain-based track and trace platform, and its creators hope that it will revolutionize the management of supply chains.
“Today, supply chains are very complex,” Masatake Toyota, director of secure computing at KPMG Ignition Tokyo, told Akihabara News in a recent interview. “Each participant along the supply chain, which can be very long, would have at least one database. So you end up with many different databases for the whole supply chain.”
This reality can lead to a number of problems, especially when some of the data remains only in paper form and the databases are not standardized. This can easily lead to delays in information transmission, misinterpretations, and even fraud.
Supply chains for food products can also involve small-business farmers on one end, some of whom, especially in a country like Japan, may be elderly and not particularly tech savvy.
KPMG Origins offers a secure platform, based on the flexible blockchain framework Hyperledger Fabric, that allows participants in the supply chain to operate from a single source of information.
The advantages of this system are that the data along the supply chain becomes trusted and verified, that it offers realtime end-to-end information, and that control across national borders becomes seamless.
Those who employ KPMG Origins can access it through both desktop and mobile devices.
KPMG Ignition Tokyo, a company that launched last July, also offers supply chain mapping and training services to get its KPMG Origins customers up and running.
They are working on refinements such as voice control to make the product even more user friendly in future years.
KPMG Origins is only beginning to hit the markets this year, but several clients in Australia have already been engaged.