Marelli have put trendy blockchain technology to work enhancing the management of automotive supply chains, creating a distributed peer-to-peer network to connect suppliers’ and carmakers’ plants around the world. Based on the real-time exchange of “blocks” of immutable and verifiable data, this technology improves traceability of automotive components and raw materials, improving the efficiency and reliability of transactions and operations.
Blockchain has been implemented in a joint project between Marelli Automotive Lighting and the BMW Group, who together designed and developed the new PartChain application.
PartChain has been adopted, as a first step, for a pilot activity focused on the traceability of headlamps, rear lamps, and lighting modules supplied by Marelli for a number of BMW Group vehicles. Three Marelli Automotive Lighting plants, located in Czechia, Italy, and Mexico, and two BMW Group plants in the U.S. and Germany were connected through PartChain. Within this first project, the platform is managing more than 100,000 data points directly referred to parts and vehicles.
Sylvain Dubois, CEO of Marelli Automotive Lighting, says “Ensuring transparency, authenticity, reliability, and efficiency in the management of supply chains are crucial goals for all the automotive players. The increasing complexity of products, in conjunction with globally diversified value chains, are in fact presenting the automotive industry with growing challenges and technologies like blockchain, which represents the forefront of innovation in this field, bring a crucial contribution to improve the system”.