The retail giants, such as Nike and Macy’s have been working with Auburn’s RFID Lab in Alabama, US on a blockchain project that will provide a digital solution for the retail supply chain. This project has been explained in the white paper made by Auburn University’s RFID Lab.
The project called “Chain Integration Project" (CHIP) is focused on the optimization of product data sharing across the supply chain, has worked with the part of the giant supply chains of the companies-participants, where they implemented Hyperledger Fabric nodes. This project attracted such companies as Nike, Macy’s, Tommy Hilfiger parent company PVH Corp, Herman Kay, Kohl’s and others.
The study defined high effectiveness of blockchain systems used to share serialized data after following tens of thousands of products including Nike Kids’ Air Force 1 shoes and Michael Kors parkas as they moved between distribution centers. Moreover, many retailers have made their own researches, implementing product movements via radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in all company units.
Research Fellow at RFID Lab at Auburn University Allan Gulley is just entering the sphere of distributed ledger technology, being one of the US key outposts of retailers’ experiments, researching the emerging supply chain. Thus, the CHIP became a real blockchain trial they are currently actively working on. The main reason for starting this project was the greats difference in data operating within different retail companies, sending data on the lab in absolutely different ways. The researchers saw the necessity to elaborate one common effective way of data storage and sharing through one common platform that can guarantee the data security standardize the process of data management.