Abstract
In the era of paper-based contract, a lot of time, human labor and expenses are required to handle the process of contract drafting, contract signing, contract execution, and payment settlement. The emerging of electronic contract enhances the tedious signing process of paper-based contract and improves the efficiency of contract management. However, due to the centralized system architecture and the database-based storage schema, the stored contract data is at high risk of information leaking, data tampering and hacker attacks. In this study, we introduce Blockchain technology to the contract management, and develop a process-oriented contract management system (BEcontractor) for a Hangzhou-located power grid enterprise X, aiming to solve a series of security issues existing in the traditional electronic contract system. By deploying BEcontractor, procurement activities could be resumed online among X and its nation-widely commodity suppliers during COVID-19 epidemic. Up to September 2020, 6336 electronic contracts have been signed, with an accumulated amount of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\yen ~6.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> billion. It is showed that the cost for accomplishing the contract signing process was significantly reduced, and the payment period was shortened from three months to around one month.
Highlights
Commodity procurement contracts are the agreements between two parties [1]
In this paper, we proposed a Blockchain technology (BCT)-driven procurement contract management system – Becontractor, which implements the management of contract documents and signing process tracking, and provides automatic contract execution services enabled by smart contract
It is confirmed that 11 days can be saved from drafting a contract to signing the contract on average when compared with the traditional paper contract
Summary
Commodity procurement contracts are the agreements between two parties [1]. The management of these contracts directly affects the operational efficiency of power enterprise X (a leading enterprise in power industry), and has a significant impact on the progress of power grid projects. Blockchain technology (BCT) is employed as the underlying mechanism to achieve transactions for these digital currency (e.g. bitcoin), which is first proposed by Nakamoto in 2008 and implemented based on cryptography [8], [9]. In this case, we used alliance Blockchain, which only allows selected nodes (i.e. the power grid enterprises) to maintain the ledger, and ensures that the content of the contract is only visible to the parties in the partnership. The key novel contributions in this paper are summarized as follows: 1) proposing a BCT-based electronic contract management model to address issues of counterfeit on signature and lack of procedure traceability in commodity procurement for electronic power industry. Any attempt to forge a data block needs to fabricate all preceding data blocks, which is nearly impossible
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