Just take a moment and think…
You are planning to go on a holiday and order a travel bag online.
Is it important for you to get a shipment on time?
Is it important for you to get your shipment at all?(or is it ok if your shipment gets lost on the way and never reaches you?)
Is it important to know where is your shipment right now and if there would be any possible delays?
In most cases the answers to the above 3 questions would be yes. Not surprisingly from individuals to businesses we all depend upon the movement of goods from the point of manufacture to the point of consumption. All this movement and its management comes under the category of Logistics.
You may be a buyer of goods or a business seeking to procure supplies for your business we all need our goods to arrive on time, intact without any damage to our shipment. Yet that is not always the case. Despite having to pay the Freight charges that are quite high the service leaves a lot to be desired. There are delays, lack of transparency, lack of connect as to where exactly my shipment lies and lack of communication from the freight carrying agency in case of any foreseeable delays.
So can these be improved?
The one word answer would be "Yes" and with a solution called ShipChain.
The Solution
The ShipChain platform is based on a simple, yet powerful solution called "Track and Trace."
ShipChain is creating a meeting ground of buyers like you and me and businesses on one side who see to engage and use freight and logistic services. The other side of the table would be the freight service providers.
The buyers would meet the logistic providers in a web based decentralized platform created by ShipChain.
To do business in this market ShipChain has introduced a ERC20 SHIP Token to transact business on this decentralized marketplace for logistics businesses that would be powered by the ethereum based blockchain.
Yet the current scheme of things is such that one finds it very difficult to incorporate a change in the way the industry works.
So how would ShipChain succeed where others have failed?
For starters it is trying to do everything with a fresh approach but instead of asking or expecting the Logistics industry to change over night it is proving a marketplace interface that would integrate with the existing freight management software through an API access that ShipChain would provide.
Consignments can be tracked and managed via acomputer or a mobile interface.
In simple terms it would use the block chain and the side chain along with smart contracts to make enable the details of each consignment available to the involved parties. Details such as the location etc would be share in an encrypted format with those who need to know this information. The details of the completed transactions would be stored on the main blockchain.
Instead of going into the technicalities lets look at how a business would benefit.
Jack is in the business of Packing and distributing food articles and supplying them across the country. He imports dryfruits, chocolates and fresh exotic vegetables. His food are not only popular with clients across the country but also with thief’s who often break into his consignments while in transit and flee with part of the consignment. Since his supplies travel long distances he has begin to take this as part of a business risks. However these break ins expose the vegetables and fruits to the weathering and in the process of this theft at times the documentation goes missing. For one reason or other at times his vegetable consignments get stuck when the documentation goes missing. The process of resolving paperwork costs Jack a lot of money and time.
Now if jack were to hire and mange his consignments via the "Track and Trace solution of ShipChain then a high degree of security would automatically get integrated in every transaction that he conducted.
The sidechain would feed him with periodic locations of his shipment, any break-ins into his containers would be easy to detect in real time and a timely remedial action can be taken.
His freight charges would be lower as there would be few middle men involved if any.
Plus the carriers would be given an incentive reward to find and report profitable routes thus the focus would be on increasing the system efficiency and healthy competition.The incentive would make the operators work for this system rather then against it.
This would surely change the way logistics work currently.
Funding for this project would be via an ICO for details please refer these links.
ShipChain.io
ShipChain.io WhitePaper
ShipChain.io Facebook
ShipChain.io Medium
ShipChain.io Twitter
ShipChain.io LinkedIn
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@originalworks/90-steem-submission-bonuses-sponsored-writing-contest-shipchain-io
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