No, the chain-of-provenance use-case is to prevent people from being able to sell grey-market products while claiming that they're official products. E.g. selling iPhones built out of reconstituted parts from iPhones that were pickpocketed from their owners and then scrapped for parts. (Yes, this is a big issue — Google "my stolen phone ended up in shenzhen" and you'll get a ton of news stories.)
If you (or a retailer) forces the retailer (wholesaler) to provide a chain of digital signatures demonstrating each hand-off of the parts all the way back to the factory that produced them, then you implicitly reject any assemblage of parts where some of the parts were black-market-sourced. Which allows for legitimate refurbishing using legitimately acquired parts (i.e. it doesn't put the Shenzhen phone-repair stores themselves out of business); but destroys the demand for the electronics "chop shops" these stores currently sometimes order parts from.
In this case, a "blockchain" here is an open-public-participation multiparty ledger that tracks ownership of physical goods; with a digital signature inherent to each transfer of the digital asset representing the physical good, which should be done at time of transfer of physical goods. Unlike other use-cases, you really can't simplify the solution — to enable this use-case, you need a system with pretty much all the properties of a blockchain.
