Inventory asset management
Blockchain technology is considered to be a game-changer for building an immutable, decentralized, trustless, and peer-to-peer ledger for business logic. Records in the blockchain are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a block timestamp, transaction data, and the previous block's cryptographic hash information.
IT asset management is an important part of an organization's strategy. It usually involves incorporating detailed IT assets and inventory information for business practices, such as hardware purchases and redistribution. Typical business practices include the request and approval process, procurement management, life cycle management, and so on.
Today, there are many participants in an asset's life cycle—from the manufacturer, the transporter, the IT service department, all the way to the end user—with each having their own management system. As a result, it's quite difficult to integrate all of these different bits of data to maintain a single version of the truth for the asset's entire life cycle.
By design, blockchain is a shared ledger technology. It is really good at registering, controlling, and transferring assets. Applying blockchain in an asset-tracking management system allows us to track digital transactions more securely and transparently. It provides new opportunities for organizations to correct problems within the asset management industry as it revolves around a single source of truth.
In this chapter, we will look at the processes involved in an IT asset management system. One of the main processes is tracking the complete life cycle of the assets. This includes ordering the asset, shipping the asset, receiving the asset, requesting a new asset, approving the asset, and then recycling and retiring the asset. Other record-tracking activities involve geographically locating the asset across the organization's various locations. This allows organizations to maintain the inventory better, to identify where the asset is currently located, and which asset is available at any time.
For the sake of our demonstration, we are going to simplify the entire process, as it can be very complex in a real-world scenario. In the following school IT-asset management system, we have defined three participants: the School Administrative Office (SAO), the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), and the end user, who is a student. In this scenario, the following occurs:
- The SAO places an Order to the OEM
- The OEM receives the Order, makes the products, and ships the orders
- The school receives the Order and distributes the products to the students
The overall process is shown in the following diagram:
In the following recipe, we will implement this flow using Fabric chaincode.