Maersk/IBM Supply Chain Failure: Why It Doesn’t Work

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Danish shipping company Maersk and IBM are halting charges on their blockchain-based supply chain tracking offering, the shipowner mentions. TradeLens, this is the name of the blockchain platform, is discontinued.

The Danish shipowner wanted to use the blockchain to manage international maritime freight between the various actors in the network on an international scale: shippers, freight forwarders, maritime carriers, ports and customs authorities.

TradeLens was founded on a “bold vision to take a leap forward in the digitalization of the global supply chain on an open and neutral industry platform,” said Rotem Hershko, Head of Trade Platforms at Maersk.

No proven use cases

The Israeli Zim Integrated Shipping Services, the French CMA CGM and the Italian MSC joined the TradeLens project in 2019, as did the German Hapag-Lloyd and the Japanese Ocean Network Express. The idea was to use the properties of the blockchain to improve the functioning of the supply chain by sharing information between major shipowners.

While the platform appears to have been viable and functional, the need for full global industry collaboration appears to have been lacking. As a result, TradeLens did not reach profitability after 4 years of operation. As of December 2019, TradeLens was publishing 2 million events per day and its ecosystem had over 175 organizations. The platform collected data from more than 600 ports and terminals around the world, mentions the FreightWaves site.

The platform will be taken offline at the end of the next first quarter.

TradeLens was announced in 2017 and jointly developed by IBM and GTD Solution, a division of Maersk. The blockchain tool was the open-source Hyperledger Fabric platform, spun off from the Linux Foundation.



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