International Comparative Research on IoT-based Supply Chain Risk

A/Prof. Yu Cui

Graduate School of Administration and , Otemon Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan

Email: [email protected]

Prof. Hiroki Idota

Faculty of Economics, Kindai University

Prof. Masaharu Ota

Graduate School of Business, Osaka City University International Comparative Research on IoT-based Supply Chain

ABSTRACT In this paper, we firstly discuss current status and problems of food supply chain, which has been attached more importance in supply chain studies in recent years. And then, a review and analysis of the research on traceability systems for IoT-based food supply chains will be conducted. In the latter part, we introduce and explain the establishment of food supply chains in Thailand and China and their respective traceability systems with case studies. Moreover, we conduct a systematic analysis regarding the changes and effects the blockchain made on supply chains. Furthermore, through a case analysis of Japan, explicit speculation and forecast would be made on how blockchain affects the development of traceability systems of IoT- based food supply chain.

Keywords: Food Supply Chain, Risk Management, IoT-based Traceability System, Blockchain

INTRODUCTION In 2011, Thailand suffered a severe flooding which occurs once in 50 years. Its traditional industrial base - Ayutthaya Industrial Park was flooded and nearly 200 factories were closed down. In the same year, Japan’s 311 Kanto Earthquake also caused serious losses to the manufacturing industry and numerous supply chain companies in Japan. And recently, scandals involving data falsification in automotive, steel and carbon fiber have caused great impact on a large number of related supply chain companies and they are faced with the dilemma of supply chain disruption. In China, Sanlu Milk Powder Incident and Shanghai Fuxi Incident caused by the fact that information on manufacturer's irregular and unethical behavior was not shared with other enterprises in the supply chain in time, giving rise to serious losses to supply chain companies and leading to public's distrust. In particular, information asymmetry and insufficiency on food supply chain brought serious risk and hidden dangers to supply chain node enterprises. Therefore, how to prevent the above mentioned various types of supply chain crises and properly deal with them after the occurrence so as to promptly restore supply chain to normal and re-establish the trust of public are urgent issue. In this context, establishing an IoT-based traceability system across the supply chain is most essential for implementing resilient supply chain. In this paper, we will first discuss current status and problems of food supply chain, which has been attached more and more importance in supply chain research in recent years. After this, a review and analysis of the research on traceability systems for IoT-based food supply chains will be conducted. In the latter part of the paper, we will introduce and explain the establishment of food supply chains in Thailand and China and their respective traceability systems through examples. After this, we will conduct a systematic analysis regarding the changes and effects the blockchain, which has become widely known as a result of the focus on fictitious cryptocurrency - bitcoin made on supply chains and especially, food supply chains. In the end, through a case analysis of Japan, explicit speculation and forecast will be made on how blockchain affects the development of traceability systems of IoT-based food supply chain. THE DEVELOPMENT OF FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN In 1996, Zuurbier et al. first proposed the concept of food supply chain on the basis of supply chain, and considered food as a vertical integration mode of operation conducted by of agricultural products and food production and sales for the purpose of reducing cost of food and agricultural products and improving quality stability and level of logistics services (Zuurbier, 1999). The research on food supply chain management has gone through several phases: the first phase is business flow management phase, and research scope covers business flow phase from output of agricultural products and food processing enterprises to their delivery to consumers. The research content is usually concluded in marketing category. The next phase is integrated logistics management phase. The logistics management of agricultural products is separated from marketing and extended upstream to the process of production and processing in enterprises manufacturing agricultural products and food, emphasizing market-oriented production and cost on the entire procedure of logistics. In the last phase, regarding integrated supply chain management phase, research scope extends further to the most upstream enterprises of agricultural products, the purpose of which is to follow and trace security issues regarding quality of agricultural products and food, so problems can be detected and solved effectively.

Current Researches of Traceable Food Supply Chain

The emergence and development of food supply chain is an inevitable result of continuously enhanced demand of food consumption in recent years. Consumers are also paying more and more attention to the quality and safety of food. To meet consumers' demands on types and quantities of food and agricultural products, enterprises are constantly exploring and developing new technologies, nevertheless, when consumer demands being fulfilled, excessive use of new technologies and methods hazard human body and thus causes food quality and safety issues inevitably. Reason for this is information asymmetry between buyers and sellers in the market. In detail, when consumers purchase food or agricultural products, they lack product's hygiene, environmental and safety information. Therefore, it is necessary for enterprises to inspect and test products in all the phases of production procedure and disclose the information to consumers in time. According to the definitions made by Codex Alimentary Commission and the International Organization for Standardization, traceability system can be expressed as: “a technical tool to assist an organization to conform with its defined objectives, and is applicable when necessary to determine the history or location of a product or its relevant components.” (ISO, 2007). Food safety depends on every node in supply chain. Therefore, it is essential for every node firm to store relevant information of food production process for future reference. Traceability systems include internal traceability system and external traceability system. The former one refers to the tracing of products and relevant information within certain organizational chain of supply chain, such as quality traceability system of wholesalers’ , which is often a quality assurance system embedded in an organization. While the latter one is a vertical retrospective one across the entire supply chain, referring to the tracing of data and transaction process at every node. Gandino et al. (2009) studied the impact of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) on food supply chain traceability. Regattieri et al. (2007) established a conceptual framework model for traceability systems. Alfaro and Ràbade (2009) studied the inventory management of traceability system. Narsimhalu, et al. (2015) studied performance evaluation and optimization of traceability systems.

IoT-BASED TRACEABLE FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN Widespread application of of Things (IoT) technology has made a profound impact on food supply chain. The so-called IoT refers to a huge network constructed through the combination of a variety of information sensing devices such as RFID devices, product electronic codes(EPCs), infrared sensors, global positioning systems, laser scanners and other devices with the Internet (Yan et al., 2012). Its purpose is to have all items connected to the network for better identification and management. Wireless network is connected through electronic tag RFID, EPC, sensors, two-dimensional code and other interfaces installed on various objects, so as to intelligentize objects and realize communication between human beings and objects. In the meantime, communication and dialogues among objects can also be actualized. Therefore, IoT is widely applied in fields including transportation and logistics, medical system, intelligent environment, personal and social applications. From the perspective of risk management, it is necessary to identify potential major risk factors in the chain, and to analyze in depth the causes and manifestations of various risk factors. With analyzing the causal relationship between this key factor and other risk factors, effective measures to control risk might be sought from the causation, accordingly, various countermeasures for risk control are put forward for the purpose of risk prevention. Based on IoT technologies, historical production process of products is automatically sensed and recorded through RFID, and the information is integrated into traceable network so that the entire process of recording and monitoring products from , production, processing, storage, packaging and distribution can be achieved, network tracking can also be conducted in the application terminal at any time through IoT.

INTRODUCTION OF BLOCKCHAIN Along with the development of IoT technologies and the advent Big Data era, realization of decentralized operation mode that has been unsolved in business field for years becomes possible. A typical example of this operation mode is blockchain which supports the highlighted virtual crypto currency bitcoin as backstage technology. At present, there is no unified definition for blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out that blockchain is jointly maintained, managed and supervised by nodes in network, and it is decentralized and trustless (Nakamoto, 2008). According to Swan, M (2015), blockhain technology is a decentralized, open and transparent database. Noguchi, Y. (2017) considers blockchain as a decentralized and database trusted technology formed through integrating mathematical algorithms to constitute orderly data block. In the application of blockchain, Ricke et al.(2017) indicated that blockchain can make robots work without being affected by improper human-computer interactions and data tampering of supervisors, ensuring the authenticity of sensing data of microbiological sampling robot system. Based on the characteristics of blockchain, Tapscott et al. (2016) changed the thinking of energy internet and explored practical and potential application of blockchain in energy Internet. They suggested that blockchain may fundamentally change the modern financial credit system and reduce financial risks, breaking through financial sector and expanding the application range of blockchain. On the basis of blockchain, coupling analysis combing the blockchain with supply chain logistics information is conducted, and supply chain logistics information ecological model is constructed. In the meantime, the application of blockchain in supply chain logistics information resource management is also explored.

The Combination of Blockchain and Supply Chain The updating and maintaining of blockchain database is accomplished by distributed subjects corporately rather than being implemented by a certain traditional central agency, which embodies the decentralized characteristic of blockchain technology. Supply chain is a diversified, multi-level and multi-functional chained organization in which manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, retailers and customers realize resource sharing through information sharing. Blockchain technology and supply chain information resources distributed management are based on the idea of decentralization, and main bodies equally exchange and store information and have the same rights and obligations, which reflects the general coupling relationship of them (Edwards, 2017). From the next chapter, we will conduct in-depth analysis and argumentation of the above concepts and elaborations through case studies from different countries.

TRACEABILITY SYSTEM FOR SUPPLY CHAIN RISK MANAGEMENT OF CHAROEN POKPHAND FOOD Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group, is the biggest integrator in Thailand and also the country’s largest comprehensive food company. Among the CP group, the largest subsidiary is CP Food (CPF), covering each stage from food processing to distribution (CPF, 2018). The company’s main production base is in Thailand, but also has overseas bases. Foods to be handled are mainly poultry meat, livestock products such as pork, and marine products such as shrimp and fish. CPF introduced Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), HACCP, International Standard (ISO) 9002, etc., ensuring food safety and quality assurance more reliably. In addition, CPF independently develops a quality check system to be carried out at each process of food production and a traceability system that can trace raw materials to the production stage.

The traceability system of CPF consists of the following three elements.

Individual identification system is indispensable for identifying diseased animals and is the basis for the entire system. For this purpose, each livestock is assigned a unique number. For domestic animals, devices with numbers recorded are attached to individuals. This device has a type such as ear tag and wireless chip (RFID). In the case of broilers, unlike in the case of cattle and pigs, instead of identifying individuals using ear tags or wireless chips, a method is adopted in which numbers are allocated and managed for each flock group.

By registering the positions of individuals and flocks in the position confirmation system, it is possible to quickly grasp the areas and livestock in which producers are affected when disease occurs. In addition, this will help administrators in charge of animal health help to locate risky livestock, make accurate judgment to minimize the damage, and smoothly respond to containment of disease and prevention of spread.

The tracking system consists of livestock location information and a record of movement. This system can provide information on the location and movement history of livestock to administrative officials in charge of animal hygiene in order to investigate the fact that diseases of livestock have occurred.

In this traceability system, both the seller and the consumer can confirm the series of records of the feed, the livestock and the processing from the start of livestock rearing on the Internet. According to the report (Netherlands Embassy in Bangkok, 2016), many importing countries are requesting traceability of the whole process of food production, requesting documents to confirm the quality of foods. In particular, as it is becoming a prerequisite, implementing the traceability system will work advantageously for chicken exports.

THE REAL-TIME CONTROLLABLE AND FULLY TRACEABLE SYSTEM OF XIANYI GROUP WITH IOT Henan Fresh Easy Supply Chain co., LTD (Xianyi Group in Chinese) is one of the temperature control model of supply chain enterprise in China, based on cloud temperature control supply chain system (Xianyi, 2018). Based on the Internet background of the fresh industry, the supply chain service is positioned in Online to Offline (O2O), and the temperature control supply chain integration service platform is built to its own. The networked service capability provides customers with six product systems: warehouse transportation, collection and distribution, distribution processing and supply chain .

Figure 1. The Diagram of Xianyi’s Cold Chain Traceability System (Cui, 2018)

Fresh foods are extremely demanding on temperature, and the entire chain is the most fundamental for food safety. Simply providing a single aspect of the service makes it difficult to achieve effective links from the origin to the end, nor to meet increasingly diverse customer needs. Xianyi builds a One-stop temperature control supply chain services system that is fully end-to-end visualized, thus providing partners with standard certification, procurement execution, customs declaration, cold chain logistics, circulation processing, and warehousing under the premise of ensuring food safety. In China, the entire chain of fresh produce from the origin to the end is difficult to regulate, standardization of miscellaneous categories, and quality control is difficult. Xianyi breaks down the company’s temperature-controlled supply chain services into standardized products through service productization: standardized management, standardized processes, standardized equipment, and strict operation of each circulation link to form standardized and integrated process.

Building Traceable Food Supply Chain

In recent years, Xianyi has integrated new technologies with the fresh food supply chain, and applied the Internet of Things (IoT) to all aspects of fresh foods industry, such as raw material procurement, production and processing, circulation processing, temperature-controlled warehousing, cold chain transportation and distribution, etc., in order to achieve the traceability of food safety (Cui, 2018). Based on cloud computing and big data, Xianyi builds a smart warehousing and transportation system, and uses Internet of Things technologies such as RFID tags, GPS, temperature sensors, and driver application to monitor the status of fresh products in circulation during real-time, including temperature, cargo status and GPS positioning information, food status and quality information, to ensure that the entire process of the waybill can be visualized and platformized, and to ensure food safety (see Figure 1.).

In the upstream farming and animal husbandry environment, Xianyi sets up a cloud agriculture and animal husbandry industry service platform, and through the data exchange with the upstream breeding base, opens up the industrial data chain, monitors the pig breeding environment and process, realizes the quality trace of agricultural products, and ensures the source safety and quality. In the processing and manufacturing process, Xianyi transforms the production, processing and manufacturing production line through new technologies such as IoT, and realizes online operation equipment operation analysis, fault warning, quality diagnosis, remote maintenance, through equipment intelligent transformation and facility function upgrade. Therefore, the digitization and intelligent levels of production equipment are enhanced, the visualization of production services is realized in order to ensure food and production safety.

EACH FARMER CROSS－MONITORS PRODUCTION INFORMATION IN THE JAPANESE EXPERIMENT The company of Information Service International-Dentsu, which deals with system construction, to utilize benefits of difficult tampering for food traceability (tracking production history). Since the beginning of October 2016, Dentsu has been conducting demonstration experiments to ensure the quality of organic agricultural products in cooperation with Aya-cho, Miyazaki Prefecture’s district. Organic vegetables take 2 to 3 times more time and effort than ordinary farming methods. However, with the current agricultural mechanism, its cost cannot be reflected in the price as it is. In addition, Japanese consumers stick to whether vegetables are domestic, but they are not very interested in further value (ISID, 2018). Therefore, organic vegetables do not sell very well in normal supermarkets. However, there are certain consumers who are seeking safe vegetables. If reliable vegetables can be delivered to such consumers, the labor of organic farming can be valued (ISID, 2018). Each farmer in Aya-cho carries out planting and harvesting, use of fertilizers and agricultural chemicals, quality check of soil and agricultural products, etc. based on certification criteria established by Aya-cho (see Figure 2). In the field trial, all of these histories are recorded on the block chain. Aya-cho grants a unique ID along with an approval mark by its own standard to agricultural products shipped after this process. By searching with this unique ID, consumers can confirm on the Internet that the agricultural products are definitely produced by Aya-cho, that they were produced based on Aya-cho’s strict certification criteria, that their history has not been tampered. If these vegetables are sold to consumers directly by Marche etc., the value of organic farming method can be reflected in price. The blockchain that registers production management information by this demonstration is a so-called “private type” blockchain which Aya-cho operates and manages. Such unique private blockchain are characterized by faster processing than public blockchain used in bit coins and the like. However, this system alone can not maintain objectivity like a public block chain. Therefore, in Aya-cho, data was first written to a rapidly processing blockchain, and the information was managed by a public blockchain provided by Estonia's Guardtime. In this way, by realizing with high reliability and security guaranteed by using blockchain technology, it is possible to create new value in the field that has been overlooked so far.

Figure 2. The Structure of Dentsu’s Traceability System based on Blockchain (Created by authors)

DISCUSSION AND FORESIGHT

The purpose of supply chain management is to minimize system cost under certain service levels. Traditional supply chain management is simply connecting node enterprises in series to form a chained entirety. In digital era, supply chain enterprises realize the efficient flow of logistics, information flow and capital flow through information network, with logistics and capital flow as the foundation of supply chain structure. Information flow constitutes the neural network of supply chain and is the link connecting all parties. While in terms of information flow, various information generated by supply chain operations are separately stored in the system of separate link, resulting in a lack of transparency and traceability of information flow. About the case of Thailand, CPF realized traceability of the entire process of food production by its own system, and utilizing IoT technology, thorough risk management in emergency such as disease occurrence is done. However, Thailand Department of Livestock Development (DLD) provides electronic systems and databases for managing the quality of livestock products, and provides e-services that enable stakeholders to apply for various applications efficiently. A distributor and/or processor who wishes to move livestock and carcasses that submitted an e - movement (a system that can apply for moving livestock on the Web) is supposed to receive a permit from the DLD via the internet in advance. That is to say, the information of livestock products needs to be managed directly and/or indirectly by government departments, and even intergovernmental information management involvement is necessary for risk management of livestock distributor, processor and other stakeholders. About the case of China, Xianyi has created a PaaS information service platform and a self-developed cold chain traceability system through the innovation and application of IoT, realizing the standardization, informationization and visualization of the whole process of order logistics, allowing products to be seamlessly monitored in the entire chain. However, the traceability system not only need the government involvement as well as CPF, but also fundamentally be built as a centralized architecture. This will cause some significant potential problems such as system overload, vulnerability, asymmetry of information, etc., and information quality and instantaneousness of the traceability system will be suspected as the core of risk management. About the case of Japan, Dentsu and Aya-cho conducted the first experiment in vegetables production and distribution, aided by the technology of blockchain which is operated under a decentralized architecture. In this experiment, data was written at the stage when producers planted vegetables, weeded, and harvested the fields. Not only the growth situation, but also soil condition will be upgraded sequentially with photos. When the production farmer’s writing reaches a certain amount, data can be blocked. After that, the data is shared with the computer owned by each producer via the Internet. Then, everyone always monitors whether the written information is correct or not. In the other hand, there are some new conceptual and practical models be proposed and partially given solutions to the above issues. For instance, Pang, et al. (2012) proposed a value-centric design of the internet-of-things solution for food supply chain. They insist that the system paradigm must be extended from the traditional traceability-centric design to the value-centric design. And a systematic value-centric business-technology joint design framework is presented and verified by prototype system. However, as authors mentioned in the paper, a limitation is that a static sensor portfolio strategy was used, so that some sensors could not be changed. Furthermore, even the dynamic sensor portfolio approach can be used, the system is still built as a centralized architecture, and those problems such as vulnerability and overload, won’t be solved eventually. In addition, Verdouw, et al. (2016) purported a virtualized architecture of food supply chains with the internet of things. They introduced an approach to virtualization of business control in food supply chain, and proposed the Flspace platform which is presenting how the approach can be implemented by using generic technology enablers, such as IoT and Cloud Computing capabilities. Even though this approach certainly provided to us a novel prospect such as the application of Virtual Reality (VR) technology in food supply chain, they didn’t mention about information distortion and information security which are critical issues from the risk management point of view. By the way, the introduction of blockchain technology enables all supply chain node companies to accurately grasp data and information, forming a smooth and transparent information flow in blockchain supply chain, and problems existing in operation process can also be timely detected and solved. At the same time, the time-stamped blockchain data and information can resolve the disputes among the participants in supply chain and trace existing problems of product circulation in supply chain. To conclude, with the development of big data, Internet of Things and cloud computing, blockchain technology is expected to be applied to all walks of life. The research on blockchain technology is also in full swing in the industry and academia. The application of supply chain risk management based on blockchain technology will further enhance the security of member enterprises, their capital flow, information flow and logistics and present a more efficient and robust supply chain with a wide range of applications. From the overall development of its process, the development of food supply chain based on blockchain technology is still in its infancy. On the one hand, with the standardization of data based on blockchain technology platform, can the interconnection of values be realized and the problems regarding standardization of embedded technologies, business and various interface data be solved, and it is possible to actualize large-scale application and promotion in future. On the other hand, issues such as whether the performance of supply chain platform based on blockchain technology is stable, whether the capacity can be expanded, whether traceability can be guaranteed, and so on, still need to be explored in applications and be verified by practice constantly. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we first describe and analyze the status and characteristics of food supply chain in detail. And then we conduct a systematic research on the establishment of IoT-based food supply chain and the traceability of safety . And on this basis, related cases of representative enterprises in Thailand and China are introduced and analyzed. In the latter part of the paper, the innovative and rigorous blockchain technology, and the opportunities and challenges it brought to supply chain risk management system are analyzed and refined. We take Japan’s case as an example, analyze and predict the development and prospect of its application. In the end, we make summarization and prospects for the realization of blockchain technology – orientated and IoT-based supply chain risk management system.

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APPENDIX

Figure 1. The Diagram of Xianyi’s Cold Chain Traceability System (Cui, 2018)

Figure 2. The Structure of Dentsu’s Traceability System based on Blockchain (Created by authors) Revision list

Before After The Chapter of INTRODUCTION OF Transferred all the contents to p.3 and 4, in BLOCKCHAIN in p.5 order to respond comments of reviewer 1 and 2.

The Chapter of TRACEABILITY SYSTEM FOR Revised all the contents in this Chapter, in order SUPPLY CHAIN RISK MANAGEMENT OF to respond comments of reviewer 2. CHAROEN POKPHAND FOOD in p.3 The Chapter of COLD CHAIN OF XIANYI Revised all the contents in this Chapter, in order SUPPLY CHAIN in p.4 and 5. to respond comments of reviewer 2.

The chapter of EACH FARMER CROSS－ Revised all the contents in this Chapter, in order to respond comments of reviewer 1 and 2. MONITORS PRODUCTION INFORMATION IN THE JAPANESE EXPERIMENT in p.6 and 7. The places of origin of Figure 1 and 2 in p.4 and 6. Added the places of origin of Figure 1 and 2, in order to respond comments of reviewer 2.

The chapter of DISCUSSION AND FORESIGHT Revised all the contents in this Chapter, in order in p.7. to respond comments of reviewer 1 and 2.

The section of References in p.8 and 9. Added several new references, in order to respond comments of reviewer 2.