Integration of business applications with the blockchain: Odoo and hyperledger fabric open source proof of concept

Abstract

Since its revolution in the financial sector, the blockchain technology disrupted the majority of collaboration-based applications including supply chain management. The supply chain is one of the most important sectors benefiting from all the advantages of blockchain. Through this paper, we are mainly focusing on the practical aspects of integrating blockchain technology with traditional and existing business applications. Indeed, most businesses and corporations will find it hard to shift from traditional architectures to a decentralized one with fears related to upgrading risks, unknown tools, and resistance to change. Thus, we mainly propose several scenarios for blockchain integration focusing on the most used Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms. Besides, we present our proof of concept integration that uses the HyperLedger Fabric blockchain platform and the Odoo ERP framework. The selection of these two solutions for our study was mainly influenced by the fact that Hyperledger is the most used open-source blockchain platform in the industry and that Odoo is the most used open-source ERP framework. Nevertheless, we believe that our proposed solution can easily be used with proprietary ERP platforms and business applications. 2021 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)