While artificial intelligence (AI), industrial robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) may dominate the manufacturing news, another technology, blockchain, is also helping to transform the sector and its associated processes. These include supply chain, inventory management, quality assurance, and supportive business functions.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology, a continuously expanding chain of records – blocks – that are linked and secured via cryptography, creating a networked audit trail of transactions, or actions that have been taken.