WELCOME TO CRYPTONIA - Manufacturing & Logistics in the age of Blockchain.

DOROTHY GALE IS A YOUNG GIRL WHO LIVES WITH HER FAMILY AND DOG TOTO ON A REMOTE FARM IN KANSAS.

A sheltered, hard-working life that of fers few surprises and is fairly easy to plan ahead. Until one day a huge cyclone comes up and hits the Gales‘ house with full force. Time and again the population in Kansas suffers from these cruel weather phenomena – and has learned to deal with them.

But this storm is different. He pulls the Gales’ house, including girl and dog, from the anchorages and carries it away. In the classic 1939 film adaptation of the “Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy, played by young Judy Garland, looks out the window and sees the points of reference of her life swirl past her like a panopticon without direction: her grandmother in a rocking chair, trees, farm animals, neighbors.

When the house finally lands back on solid ground, Dorothy and Toto step out and find themselves in a completely new, strange world. That’s when it gets interesting. Because Dorothy realizes quite quickly that she has to act differently in this other world. She has a team of multi-layered, contradictory companions around her, proves courage, situational creativity and leadership qualities and manages to set herself a great goal and pursue it. Dorothy doesn’t do two things in particular as she steps out of her house and into the world of Oz – she doesn’t try to continue to be the carefree little farm girl – and she keeps moving.

The new country we might enter tomorrow is called Cryptonia. It works according to rules and laws that radically differ from our usual ideas. Blockchain technology is currently automating trust – in banking, public administration, commerce, or law.

In order to understand how huge the blasting potential of the blockchain is, one should consider how the big four – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – are threatened by the new technology. According to the author and investor Matt Ward, today’s avant-garde digital economy will have to defend every aspect of its business models against attackers from the blockchain world. Against concepts that require neither the powerful matchmaker platforms nor the services financed by advertising and that are not suspected of covering the world with filter bubbles.

The contours of change are also beginning to emerge in the supply chain. From the extraction of raw materials to purchasing, logistics and manufacturing, new blockchain use cases and solutions are being created, some of which we would like to show you in this issue of ROI DIALOG. Opinions differ, however, as to how high and acute their potential for disruption in the manufacturing industry is.

But this debate is not very fruitful, because in the end nobody knows today how serious the changes triggered by the blockchain will be. That’s why we should be prepared if another world is waiting outside our factory gates after the storm.