Sure they can. I mean, HomeDepot uses blockchain for inventory with multiple parties involved. I don’t know if they ever went through with it but Chipotle was heavily investing into blockchain for food supply chains and the tech is 100% coming to specific food items that have higher chance of food born illness (think listeria vs. E. Coli —- foods that may contain listeria is heavily monitored. For example, you can tell a lot more about Feta cheese from their barcode than Mozz because feta is susceptible to listeria).
Real world example:
- I worked for a hospitality chain and we have an order management system for our locations.
- we had many different vendors, different SKUs, and vendors went in/out based on annual contracts.
- when a vendor was switched, someone had to update the entire database and propagate it to stores.
- all vendors, stores, etc. had different databases and there were times were wrong items are sent, items never sent, or damaged/bad items. It takes an hour, on average, to check in an order.
With Smart Contracts, this process would be simplified: order management would require less data entry, loading orders on truck would have higher accuracy (removing errors when entering new item into the system), and there are general savings since order management protocol that all the big players use is proprietary and a pain to use.
