If you’ve turned on the news or scrolled through your Twitter or LinkedIn feeds at some point during the past 12 to 18 months, you’re probably aware of the supply chain issues currently plaguing the global economy. What most average consumers don’t think about, however, is how the huge task of monitoring supplier relationships creates risk and uncertainty in supply chain management. These issues are far less documented than logistical failures or uneven supply and demand, but equally pervasive.  

Barriers to Success 

Modern supplier risk management monitoring is often conducted via an approach that is anything but modern. Risk and compliance personnel generally have fragmented information and untimely updates regarding potential or existing compliance issues.  In turn, procurement leaders rarely have a single unified view of their suppliers in one place. Instead, they must create an aggregated view by piecing together information from multiple reports and disparate sources. 

Procurement organizations often invest significant time attempting to research and understand suppliers before working with them. To support this process, they typically have multiple third-party verifiers, all on different platforms. There’s no standardization across industries pertaining to the questions asked to suppliers, which ultimately means both buyers and suppliers must routinely conduct redundant and unnecessary work. 

These are more than simply annoying obstacles. After all, today’s consumers demand nothing less than full transparency when it comes to the origins of the products they purchase and the processes that get those products to their doorsteps. Without complete visibility into their supply base, companies risk losing business, credibility, and more. 

The Promise of Blockchain 

Companies with digital transformation initiatives generally have several key goals in mind when undertaking those efforts including serving their customers better. By making blockchain integration a part of their efforts, they put those goals within reach. 

Blockchain is designed to enable trust between two parties. It does this through a variety of features, including a consensus mechanism and a shared, tamper-evident ledger. Once transactions are recorded on the ledger, they’re immutable and cannot be altered. All parties can achieve clear provenance which supports auditing capabilities. 

Chainyard’s Trust Your Supplier (or TYS) platform takes advantage of these and other attributes of blockchain design to enable supplier management in a secure and trusted environment. It provides levels of data security that are simply not possible in regular shared databases, thus reducing vulnerabilities. Relationships between buyers and suppliers are documented comprehensively, as all actions are recorded with time stamps on the blockchain. 

Most enterprise organizations have multiple back-end systems used to manage supplier payments. Trust Your Supplier offers integrations from system to system, blockchain to blockchain, allowing a seamless experience for procurement teams. 

See What’s Possible 

As part of the Trust Your Supplier network, companies can leverage integrated supplier risk data from industry-recognized validators. Having a single platform with streamlined compliance validations drives clarity and provides better oversight while enabling centralized planning in a more efficient and secure way. 

TYS’s artificial intelligence-powered tools provide continuous real-time updates on suppliers and can be set to alert compliance teams to any changes based on configurable rules. Moreover, suppliers can provide real-time updates to reflect changes to their business, which ultimately reduces the burden on procurement teams to ensure data is complete and accurate. 

As the TYS network evolves, the platform’s utility will continue to expand. To see where we’re going and to learn more about how Trust Your Supplier is improving supplier management today, visit www.TrustYourSupplier.com