EASIER: a blockchain-based artificial intelligence support system for small and medium enterprises

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly relying on digital technology to enhance production efficiency. For SMEs in the manufacturing industry, orders typically include the buyer's input information. As SMEs lack the capacity to enforce information consistency, input data are presented in buyer-specific input information, leading to duplicate records, data inconsistencies, and substantial manual intervention. To address this problem, this study adopts the Action Design Research (ADR) approach to design an artefact that embeds an artificial intelligence (AI)-based model in a blockchain, named Engineering-Aware and Standardisation-Integrated Entity Recognition (EASIER). Such an artefact is designed to automatically read and transform input data into the SME's own standardised format and generate data entries in their manufacturing system. We develop and evaluate the proposed artefact using a real SME's BOM dataset, and our results demonstrate that it achieves 99.77% in both accuracy and an F1-score on the final test set. For SMEs, the proposed method can significantly reduce manual intervention effort and improve input data consistency. This study contributes to both theory and practice by demonstrating how AI-enabled standardisation artefacts, supported by blockchain-based governance mechanisms, can be designed with SMEs to deliver practical, resource-efficient digital transformation solutions.