Big Four consultancy EY has unveiled its blockchain-based supply chain manager, developed for the Polygon network and designed to address product traceability bottlenecks.
The EY OpsChain Supply Chain Manager, now available in beta, is the first joint project between EY and Ethereum scaler Polygon after they began working together last September.
The project aims to eliminate bottlenecks in supply chains and combine product traceability with inventory management.
Companies would create tokens to represent assets and inventory, which the OpsChain manager would then track throughout the supply chain network.
Scaling networks like Polygon are designed to offload blockchain main networks like Ethereum by processing transactions on a sidechain to reduce congestion and costs.
Polygon Nightfall, the network that combines the fruits of the two companies' labor, offers zero-knowledge-proof privacy technology that guarantees only select parties can see the full history of tracked assets.
While supply chain management is often cited as a compelling use case for blockchain technology, companies may have resisted adopting such tools due to the lack of transactional privacy.
"This is exactly the kind of commercial use case we envisioned when we set out to build and implement the Polygon Nightfall network," said Antoni Martin, Enterprise Lead at Polygon. "Enterprise use cases outside of financial services are not well developed. Data protection tools open up a whole new world for us."
With the weight of a large company like EY behind it, Polygon's technology could find widespread use among companies around the world looking for innovative solutions to supply chain challenges.