Survey of Emerging Blockchain Technologies for Improving the Data Integrity and Auditability of Manufacturing Bills of Materials in Enterprise Resource Planning

Abstract

Blockchain and cloud computing continue to emerge and evolve as important technologies for data management. This has strategic implications for data stored in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. We use manufacturing bills of materials (MBOMs) as an example of critical data in ERP. MBOMs define the complex product structures of manufacturing enterprises. We survey five alternatives for storing, controlling, and auditing MBOMs in ERP: Oracle Blockchain Table; Oracle Blockchain Platform Enterprise Edition; Microsoft Azure SQL Database Ledger; SAP HANA Blockchain Ledgers; and IBM Blockchain Platform. We also consider cloud computing without blockchain technologies. We analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative by its effect on the management of MBOMs. Although we use MBOMs in our illustrations, many of the concepts discussed also apply to other critical data stored in ERPs.