The Supply Blockchain of Trust Matters More Than Ever

In a world where counterfeits are increasingly sophisticated and barely indistinguishable from the genuine articles, the most trusted suppliers will be those that combine reputation with verification. Writes Viv Muthan Pr Eng, Head of Export Sales and Operations, RS South Africa, a trading brand of London-listed RS Group plc.

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Trust has been the invisible infrastructure of supply chains for decades. Maintenance engineers trusted procurement teams to source from credible suppliers, while procurement professionals trusted manufacturers to uphold the engineering integrity of the products they supplied.

In the last two decades, this reality has dramatically shifted with counterfeiters becoming more sophisticated, technology becoming more accessible, and imitation products becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from the genuine article.

The result is that trust has fragmented and the onus of verification is falling back onto the shoulders of the product users. The problem is that even the most experienced engineer will struggle to verify a genuine product under these conditions because they are no longer competing against opportunistic non-expert counterfeiters making products that are ostensibly cheap and nasty. They are competing with networked operations with access to advanced manufacturing technologies, digital design tools and increasingly sophisticated methods of replication.

Beware of Bearings

Many years ago, the humble bearing became one of the first industrial products to be widely counterfeited. Initially, identifying a fake was relatively straightforward. Products carried obvious tell-tale signs: dye marks instead of genuine heat-treatment discolouration, spelling mistakes in product markings, poor packaging quality, unreliable documentation and no verifiable connection to an authorised source of supply.

Bearing original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) responded quickly. They launched awareness campaigns, strengthened distributor accreditation programmes and introduced anti-counterfeiting measures such as holographic labels, serialisation and QR-code verification systems. Packaging quality improved and traceability became more robust.

Within a few years, counterfeiters adapted. They started attending trade shows, copied packaging standards and used crude optical character recognition (OCR) technology to improve the visual appearance of their products. They invested in moving from copying to manufacturing replicas at scale, learning through the process, refining and getting better with each run.