Deloitte experts believe that integration of blockchain technology may revolutionize the retail and consumer packaged goods industry.
A well-known auditing firm Deloitte has published its new report titled “New tech on the block” that studies the integration of blockchain technology across retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) value chain.
The experts have examined 50 blockchain use cases within these two sectors, paying attention to three general categories of business: consumer, supply chain and payments and contracts, and defined their potential added value that they have an ability to create.
Being a digital, decentralized, distributed ledger, blockchain is able to offer a way to record, share and maintain information, both privately or publicly. And according to findings from a new Deloitte report, the retail and CPG industries have an excellent opportunity to take advantage of blockchain capacities that could lead to significant changes in all the operations and process.
Deloitte team believes that it is crucial for companies to realize how many benefits blockchain can bring to the industries, generating additional commercial value and contributing to development of much more feasible business strategies.
Steve Larke, technology consulting partner at Deloitte, said that blockchain is a “technology that has the ability to track, trace, and authenticate products, record contracts and transactions and guarantee the movement of information. Significantly, the benefits can then be passed on to the consumer in the form of savings, increased trust, and safer, higher-quality products”.
The specialists defined four segments within retail and CPG where blockchain may have the strongest impact facilitating and enhancing all the processes. These four segments include the following ones:
- Trial projects. Opportunities give a lower instant value in comparison with others due to a relatively narrow blockchain application.
- Explore. In this case there is greater value relative to investment in the short-term.
- Wait and see. At the current moment, these opportunities offer a lower value relative to other blockchain opportunities. Moreover, it is more expensive and complex to implement them if compared with other cases.
- Plan. This aspect provides the most appealing opportunities considering their potential value.
Steve Larke explained these findings stating:
“Trialling projects and exploring opportunities will be important in order to determine the complexity of implementation. Projects that offer greater value relative to investment in the short-term will obviously be more attractive to business decision makers. Without question, there are some areas that will see rapid value gains based on relatively simple implementation.”
In Larke’s opinion, today those companies that do not consider implementation of blockchain within their operations, are at “risk of falling behind competitors”.
Implementation of blockchain technology as an instrument to reach strategic business goals can lead to a significant growth of added value. Deloitte experts actively recommend consumer focused businesses to consider their resources and capacities with a view to define how they could benefit from the power that has the emerging technology.
Blockchain technology is said to get mainstream adoption maybe even sooner than we expect. That’s why retail and CPG businesses should start acting now and not wait until the last moment, otherwise they will lose the market competition.
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