A Novel Framework for Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Management using Distributed Ledger and Smart Contracts

Supply chain in industry is a flow of information and goods traversal through multiple suppliers such as raw material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end users. Supply chain management (SCM) helps in smooth monitoring and accounting of information and goods traversal among multiple users. However, the existing supply chain management processes lack in offering transparency of information, user's privacy, timely updates on demand peaks, improper tracing of information, quality management, deal repudiation and trust among users. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework for pharmaceutical supply chain management which uses an ethereum blockchain, a distributed ledger technology. We propose different smart contracts to manage pharmaceutical supply chain processes over an ethereum blockchain. This framework helps in achieving user privacy, transparency of the supplied drug, tracking of drugs, quality management, non-repudiation and demand supply management with the improved trust among the users. At the end, we analyze the proposed framework in terms of fulfilling the pharmaceutical supply chain management requirements.