Faster flow of money is possible with a blockchain. A component supplier gets his money nearly immediately as soon after ordered goods leave his premises.
Some car manufacturers like BMW or Volvo are going to monitor the supply chain for ethically difficult minerals like coltan or cobalt, in order to guarantee the money reaches the right people and not local Mafia or warlords.
There is the concept of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization):
"In a DAO world, you don’t have a boss. But what’s better is that underperformers and those who are a drag on the organization are removed much more quickly and efficiently. "
The problem is, it is not very socially minded to get rid of underperformers in a simple way. What if the person to get fired simply goes through a time of grieve? And shouldn't companies to some extent keep weak workers out of social responsibility?
I disagree with most of the opinions written down here. Most of the properties which are advertised for blockchains actually do not hold true if you formally analyze them carefully, e.g., immutability. Many other (database) systems can be used such that they achieve a majority of desirable properties which are often presented as solely achievable by blockchain technology. However, if you switch from analoge to digital world you always rely on some trust assumptions - doesn't matter whether you use blockchains or not. If you use a blockchain, you are just exchanging your trust assumptions (which was formerly typically the assumption that a centralized server behaves honestly) with other trust assumptions (sensors/IoT device work as they should, manually entered data is honestly entered) instead of getting rid of trust assumptions. However, this might be a desirable but costly goal.
As most of the blockchain technologies do not provide a sufficient level of accountability (you typically know that a party wanted to make a transaction, but 1) you are not 100% sure of the context of the transaction, 2) you don't know how parties deal with this transaction during consensus,), it opens the door to new attack vectors.
Although there is no "general" blockchain - all blockchain protocols have some subtleties which try to achieve some unique properties - I think I can agree to the following point:
In addition of all previous points: you can create a shared IT environment to secure your material sourcing, the traceability and scalling-up ethic activities/partnairs especially for critical materials like mineral of conflict or strategic materials like 3TG and Cobalt for automotive.
Many interesting potentials and also shortcomings have been already mentioned in this conversation. One important issue that needs to be added is that there is no single "blockchain technology". A public and permissionless ledger is very different from a private and permissioned one and there are some purists out there who question whether the latter should be called blockchain in the first place. I know companies who even develop their own solutions, for example, to account for fast data processing, which is often needed for integrating the Internet of Things. In a nutshell, none of the existing solutions might be perfect but if they improve the status quo in some way they are worth to be investigated.
Horst Treiblmaier we often see hybrid solutions in the industry: private part of the solution for confidentiality of the information + scalability and a public part for transparency + easier onboarding. Latest solutions are public blockchains equipped with private transaction (ZKP) capabilities.