Perpetual Interoperability of Legacy ERP and Blockchain in Supply Chain

The advent of blockchain technology has expanded the horizon of many use cases. However, the supply chain industry has still not realized its full potential as the legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and blockchain are not interoperable. Currently, organizations are running on entirely different governance rules and blockchain versions. Knowledge of every entity involved in the supply chain is limited to their adjacent entities. Thus, a series of disconnected blockchain operates in an isolated ecosystem hindering the industry's growth. The paper's main objective is the implication of blockchain technology in the supply chain industry to accomplish traceability, privacy, transparency, immutability, data standardization, resource optimization, and efficiency. We plan to develop a high-fidelity prototype for end-to-end modeling between ERPs and blockchain. A two-stage architecture is proposed to achieve a balance between privacy and transparency. The business negotiations between two ERPs are automated by off-chain order relay and on-chain settlement. A signing algorithm makes proposal sending through ERP software tamper-proof. The solution for achieving interoperability can be independent of ERP by adding a plug-in module to ERP seamlessly communicating with the blockchain.