SupplyDock

Bringing Trust To The African Resource Economy

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Inspiration

Supply chain management is tricky. For vendors, it is often difficult to assess whether a supplier is truly reliable or not. It gets even worse when big suppliers dominate their industries and overshadow the smaller players. Coming into this hackathon, we wanted to use blockchain to help smaller suppliers assert their presence in an environment where big companies usually dominate. From there, we created SupplyDock, a blockchain-powered app that provides suppliers and vendors alike with a platform to facilitate supply chain management.

What it does

SupplyDock provides a one-stop-shop for vendors to analyze key information about potential suppliers, verified through blockchain technology. Through a centralized dashboard, vendors can examine key performance metrics to assess the credibility of suppliers, supported by an algorithm that calculates an overall credit score.

How we built it

We built SupplyDock using React and HTML/CSS for the frontend, and Python for the backend, where we implemented an algorithm to evaluate credit scores. We integrated a Google Maps API to display our supply chain interactions on our dashboard.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge overall was the difficulty of implementing blockchain within SupplyDock since we had never worked with blockchain before. Another roadblock was using React, as we were unfamiliar with front-end web development. There was a lot of trial and error throughout the hackathon to overcome various bugs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For most of us, it was our first time working with blockchain to create a product. Over a short weekend, we managed to learn quite a bit about the technical aspects of blockchain. We felt especially proud of taking a step toward tackling a global issue that is always in the news.

What we learned

Overall, we learned a lot about the uses of blockchain and how its verification process can be applied to help solve current issues. In terms of technical skills, we sharpened our skills in front-end web development, especially using React. All of us came out of the hackathon knowing more about web development and intuitive UI/UX design.

What's next for SupplyDock

In the future, we aim to implement more performance metrics to analyze supplier performance more efficiently. Later on, we would also like to implement a StableCoin component within SupplyDock, enabling suppliers and vendors to make transactions using StableCoin. This will tackle currency volatility, another prevalent issue within supply chain management.

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