Blockchain can revolutionise Industry 4.0 - but we need to move from pilot to production soon

MWC19 Blockchain technologies are set to have a key impact on the supply chain - but there is still a long way to go before we see the leap which the promise has predicted. That was the primary message from an intriguing session at MWC Barcelona today which focused on Industry 4.0 and how blockchain will influence logistics. Marcus Fromm, MD, travel and transport lead at Accenture, topped and tailed his presentation with a stark contrast on how the supply chain of the future will look. His opening slide was a mass of entanglement with arrows pointing in multiple directions, while the closer was a comparative oasis of calm. For ocean shipping or air freight shipping, Fromm countered, each shipment has documentation which equates to up to 20 pages of paper for each individual container. "You can imagine this is almost unbelievable in the time of everything online, everything connected and everything real-time," he said.