Real World Case Study

(IBM/Walmart)
 Walmart Supply Chain Woes
● Walmart has been a leader of efficient supply chain operations for over 50 years offering unbeatable
prices and timely deliveries.

● Walmart has close to 12000 stores across the world employing 2.3 million employees and averaging
$32 billion in inventory annually.

● In the 1980s, Walmart began working directly with manufacturers to cut costs and reduce the
intermediary links the supply chain.

● In recent years, food safety issues have damaged the reputation of Walmart’s supply chain because
of the 2018 E. coli romaine lettuce outbreak.

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 Blockchains in the Real World
● Walmart in collaboration with IBM has been working to create the world’s largest blockchain based
supply chain network since 2018.

● Using traditional supply chains, it takes about 7 days to trace the source of food.

● With the blockchain, the process has been reduced to a few seconds.

● IBM is requiring all its suppliers of leafy green vegetables to upload their data to the blockchain by
September 2019.

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 IBM Food Trust™
● IBM Food Trust™ uses blockchain technology to create end-to-end visibility and accountability in
the food supply chain.

● The Food Trust program is connecting farmers, processors, distributors, and retailers through a
permissioned, immutable and coherent record of food system data.

● Built using the IBM Blockchain Platform, which is a tool that is used for companies to build, govern
and run blockchain networks.

● Runs on Hyperledger Fabric, an enterprise-grade private blockchain that runs on IBM Cloud.

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 Walmart and IBM Collaboration
● Walmart was initially hesitant to employ blockchains for food traceability because the systems they
had used in the past did not scale well.

● However, the problem with those systems was that they were centralized system

● So in order to test blockchains, they created two trial projects:

○ Tracing mangos sold in Walmart US stores.
○ Tracing pork sold in its China stores.

● Walmart worked with GS1 which is the standards authority in barcodes and labeling to define the
data attributes for upload to the blockchain.

● IBM wrote the chaincode (smart contracts for hyperledger.)

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 Tracking Mangos in the U.S.
● In 2016, Frank Yiannas was the VP of Food Safety at Walmart and was considering adding
blockchains to increase their food traceability.

● He bought a packet of sliced mangoes at a nearby Walmart store and asked his team to identify
which farm they had come from ASAP.

● The team started calling and emailing distributors and suppliers, and eventually had an answer
almost seven days later.

● By the end of the pilot, the time to track mangos had reduced from 7 days to under 5 seconds.

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 Life Cycle of a Walmart Mango
● Mango trees bear fruits after 5 years from planting

● Main source of mangoes for walmart are Central

and South America

● Processed and shipped to the U.S.

● Washed, peeled, sliced and put into containers in

a facility center

● Transported to store, refrigerated

and put on shelves

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 Benefits to Walmart
Increased Visibility and Fast Provenance Transparency
Traceability to Walmart for a more sustainable food
Customer system

Increased Data Integrity Increased Compliance

Verifiability

Reduced risk of tampering, Reduced Settlement

fraud & cyber crime Time & Cost

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 THANK YOU!
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