By Viv Muthan Pr Eng, Head of Export Sales and Operations.
Trust has been the invisible infrastructure of supply chains for decades. Maintenance engineers trusted procurement teams to source from credible suppliers, while procurement professionals trusted manufacturers to uphold the engineering integrity of the products they supplied. In the last two decades, this reality has dramatically shifted with counterfeiters becoming more sophisticated, technology becoming more accessible, and imitation products becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from the genuine article. The result is that trust has fragmented and the onus of verification is falling back onto the shoulders of the product users. The problem is that even the most experienced engineer will struggle to verify a genuine product under these conditions because they are no longer competing against opportunistic non-expert counterfeiters making products that are ostensibly cheap and nasty. They are competing with networked operations with access to advanced manufacturing technologies, digital design tools and increasingly sophisticated methods of replication.
Many years ago, the humble bearing became one of the first industrial products to be widely counterfeited. Initially, identifying a fake was relatively straightforward. Products carried obvious tell-tale signs: dye marks instead of genuine heat-treatment discolouration, spelling mistakes in product markings, poor packaging quality, unreliable documentation and no verifiable connection to an authorised source of supply. Bearing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) responded quickly. They launched awareness campaigns, strengthened distributor accreditation programmes and introduced anti-counterfeiting measures such as holographic labels, serialisation and QR-code verification systems. Packaging quality improved and traceability became more robust.
Within a few years, counterfeiters adapted. They started attending trade shows, copied packaging standards and used crude optical character recognition (OCR) technology to improve the visual appearance of their products. They invested in moving from copying to manufacturing replicas at scale, learning through the process, refining and getting better with each run. It became almost impossible even for a trained application engineer to spot the differences without a lab test and an electron microscope inspection of the raceways to verify surface finishes. In fact, copies became so good that one OEM actually bought production capacity at the counterfeiting facility and after implementing some standards, started mass production of some of its high-volume SKUs at that plant. This was all before the mass market availability of machine vision and deep learning tools.
So how might modern engineers respond to the very clear and present danger of counterfeit products that potentially jeopardise the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world? One useful way to think about the challenge is through the concept of a blockchain. A blockchain is commonly described as a shared, tamper-resistant record of events that allows participants to trust the history of an asset without having to blindly trust one another. It can be thought of as a digital chain of custody, recording the purchase transaction, handoffs, inspections, certificates or movements resulting in a single source of truth that all participants can verify. The value of a blockchain is not the technology but in its ability to preserve history. Once events are reliably recorded, they become difficult to alter without leaving evidence behind.
It can be argued that supply chains require precisely the same capability. Authenticity depends on provenance. Provenance depends on history. And history is only valuable when it can be trusted. A supply blockchain is not necessarily a technology platform but rather the accumulation of verified events across a product’s journey, from manufacture to point of installation or use. Every authorised transaction, inspection, storage movement, quality check and customer delivery contributes another link in the chain of trust.
Trusted suppliers have always maintained such records. Historically, trust was established through reputation. Customers bought from suppliers they knew and relied on brands that had proven themselves over decades. Today, reputation remains essential, but reputation alone is no longer enough. Customers increasingly require evidence. The most trusted suppliers will therefore be those that combine reputation with verification. They will be able to demonstrate where products originated, how they moved through the supply chain and whether they remained within authorised channels throughout their journey.
In this sense, every verified event strengthens the supply blockchain and every authenticated transaction reinforces customer confidence. As it always has been, trust is built one memory at a time. The difference today is that digital technologies can make those memories visible, auditable and resistant to manipulation.
For engineers tasked with keeping people safe, equipment operational and production running, that may be the most valuable innovation of all. Not because it eliminates risk, but because it makes trust verifiable. And perhaps that will help them sleep a little better at night, when they are not on standby or working shift.
References:
Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H., Chen, X., & Wang, H. (2018). Blockchain challenges and opportunities: A survey. International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 14(4), 352-375.
Saberi, S., Kouhizadeh, M., Sarkis, J. and Shen, L., 2019. Blockchain technology and its relationships to sustainable supply chain management. International journal of production research, 57(7), pp.2117-2135.
Staake, T., Thiesse, F. and Fleisch, E., 2009. The emergence of counterfeit trade: a literature review. European Journal of Marketing, 43(3-4), pp.320-349.
RS South Africa (https://Africa.RSDelivers.com) is a trading brand of RS Group plc (LSE: RS1) and a leading provider of industrial product and service solutions.
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