A Blockchain-Driven Electronic Contract Management System for Commodity Procurement in Electronic Power Industry

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 (sic) 6.5 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.