The aerospace and military sectors can benefit significantly from the decentralised trust, data security and integrity, traceability, transparency, visibility, and audibility that blockchain can offer in various applications.
FREMONT, CA: Blockchain significantly reduces the burden of paper, resulting in digital traceability. Paper records are constantly created, processed, managed, and stored in the A&D industry. Many of these documents are duplicated relentlessly and continuously as they move across organisational boundaries, much of it to satisfy regulatory compliance, which is critical for aircraft safety and IP protection. Also, due to the overwhelming amount of paperwork, companies save years of part records in warehouses, outside locations, and even newly purchased shipping containers.
It is no surprise that several aerospace businesses are considering digitising much of the paper that they currently handle when they manufacture, interact with, and integrate parts into finished goods, or carry out maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) tasks. The reasons for this are apparent: paper records often take a long time to compile, are prone to mistakes, are challenging to find, and are even more challenging to extract useful information from.
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New records are created and old records are consumed as supply chain partners interact with parts. There is no part-centric perspective that offers a view from the component's side and provides insight into how that part performs throughout its lifecycle, whether in the supply chain or while functioning. Instead, each party creates and saves its view from the perspective of the component. There hasn't been a facility to quickly add to the part's historical record until lately. However, for many years, the industry has struggled to understand where parts are and how they are flowing through the supply chain.
For safety, compliance with airworthiness standards, and other reasons, it is crucial to have traceability and visibility into the origin of parts and the end objects they have been placed on. Players in the sector seem to have a great chance to make better use of this important information stream.
Blockchain improves collaboration with supply chain partners, resulting in more accurate forecasting. The use of traditional MRP and other forecasting approaches will continue to expand outside the confines of the organisation. Using the digital parts platform, additional ecosystem trading partners may obtain access, resulting in the creation of an ecosystem MRP where the accuracy of ordering, fulfilling, forecasting, and carrying out supply chain planning will considerably improve.
The majority of supply chain partners today give inventory and lead-time data that isn't entirely correct to comply with service level agreements and other contractual performance metrics. Lead times are significantly increased across the supply chain as a result. Supply chain and economic performance can be significantly enhanced while simultaneously lowering obsolescence, stock-outs, AOGs, and overstocking of incorrect parts by applying MRP and other algorithms to a larger and more accurate dataset, one in which all parties are motivated to provide this data.
