The technology will be made available to the shipping and logistics industry to help manage the paper trail of tens of millions of shipping containers across the world by digitizing the supply chain process from end-to-end.
It is expected to enhance transparency and facilitate secure sharing of information among trading partners. It is designed to help reduce fraud and errors, reduce the time products spend in the transit and shipping process, improve inventory management and ultimately reduce waste and cost.
When adopted at scale, the solution has the potential to save the industry billions of dollars, says IBM.
Maersk found in 2014 that just a simple shipment of refrigerated goods from East Africa to Europe can go through nearly 30 people and organizations, including more than 200 different interactions and communications among them.
