When receiving an item you want to check the provenance of, you need some way to securely identify the product in the log. Otherwise some bad actor along the way could unlink the actual product from the ID in the log, for example by duplicating and stealing a known-good ID, yielding all the provenance information useless.
I guess this could work for electronic products where you could deeply embed something like a TPM that could provide this ID securely (which would be to expensive to extract to make it worth duplicating), but for something like a shipment of steel or even worse coal/oil/grain etc, I don't see how this would work.