Okay, but what does the blockchain do exactly? You can have all that with traditional databases and asymmetric signatures.
My suspicion is that all these benefits were just from traditional process improvements, but the suits only approved the expense once someone slapped "blockchain" on the Powerpoint slide to sufficiently bamboozle them.
They've been developing this technology since 2010. Nobody outside of academia even knew what a blockchain was at the time. The blockchain gives them an easy way to create an immutable sequence of invoice and shipping data that reduced the overhead for freight companies by 20% and reduced their manual reconciliation burden from 70% to less than 1%.
My SO used to work in factoring. She and others would spend every day reconciling invoices and shipping information in order to allow the company she worked for to supply freight haulers with short term business loans. Not only would a lack of reconciliation result in not getting paid immediately, but if enough of these pile up (see the 70% number for manual reconciliations), then you're not going to be able to get a factoring loan either and you're dead in the water until something happens. Because it worked so well, everyone jumped on board almost immediately. Freight carriers are spending 20% less to haul the same goods, and Walmart is spending less trying to reconcile invoices.
Could they have used something else? I guess. But blockchains are pretty much just immutable lists of receipts anyway. They're perfect for the use case.
> Okay, but what does the blockchain do exactly? You can have all that with traditional databases and asymmetric signatures.
I know nothing about this, but my guess is that the "blockchain" Walmart uses is more or less that: a distributed database (not everyone online all the time) with some signatures and eventual consistency.
My suspicion is that all these benefits were just from traditional process improvements, but the suits only approved the expense once someone slapped "blockchain" on the Powerpoint slide to sufficiently bamboozle them.