The need for transparency and traceability is a vital business challenge in manufacturing and maintaining supply chains both locally and globally [61]. Many companies and buyers have little to no information on their second and third tier suppliers. Several startups and companies such as Sourcemap, Hiperos and Aravo have taken initiatives to provide a solution by visualizing end-to-end supply chains and informing organizations with valuable knowledge on their third-party networks [56-58]. However, these initiatives to provide more transparency in manufacturing supply chains is incremental and mostly voluntary at present [59-60].

Incidents in the past decades that illustrated that even tight and expensive security mechanisms are unable to guarantee complete data security, thus leaving organizations at potential risks. The arrival of blockchain comes to the rescue as a blessing. At its core, a blockchain is a decentralized distributed system. A blockchain protocol runs on top of the Internet on a peer-to-peer network (i.e. the Internet) of computers (called nodes) that run the protocols individually. While Bitcoin blockchain is used to exchange digital cryptocurrency, Ethereum allows parties to exchange property, shares, or anything of value. Both of these blockchains are public and permissionless. In contrast, there is Hyperledger which is a permissioned and restrictive blockchain but allows private channels to be created among specific participants unlike other blockchains. Also, each of the blockchains has its own security mechanism and limitation.

The implementation of distributed ledger technology can improve transparency and traceability issues within every tier of the manufacturing supply chain through the use of immutable records of data or items, distributed storage of the records, and controlled user accesses; for the last requirement Hyperledger Fabric provides an excellent opportunity as it facilitates permissioned networks [61]. In this paper, we discuss the features of blockchain that make it feasible to be adopted for increased transparency and traceability. We demonstrate through implementation of Hyperledger Fabric and Composer for GM Uzbekistan that indeed blockchain has the capability to provide such feature.

Through the implemented blockchain application during the production and tracking of engine blocks, we were able to demonstrate to GM Uzbekistan the powerful use of blockchains to track each parts of a car through its manufacturing process until reaching the end buyers. It not only facilitates the buyers and gains their trust, but rather it works both ways as GM Uzbekistan is now directly able to know who their customers are and their preferences as well as the suppliers who are providing raw materials to them.