Supply chain Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Dec 14

MineHub and KrypC Leverage the Power of Hyperledger Fabric 2.2 to Transform Mining and Metals Supply Chain

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Member Case Study, Supply Chain

Read the full case study here.

Nearly 1.8 trillion USD of metals and minerals move across the world every year from mines, through ports, along transport lines, to processing plants and, ultimately, to the end users. This chain includes hundreds of companies making millions of transactions. Many of these still use manual processes—actual or digital—that require staff resources to process.

MineHub wanted to create a decentralized collaboration platform to solve this problem. The company envisioned a solution that would transform the supply chain workflows and processes for the mining and metals industry. Its solution wouldn’t just improve the practical day-to-day operations. Once in place, this robust, agile platform would help users mitigate damage from unpredictable global disruptions, reduce costs and make more profit due to higher efficiencies and end-to-end visibility of their data.

MineHub was setting out to connect hundreds of companies — from large, international corporations to small, local businesses. Each of these organizations would have unique needs and requirements. To deliver this platform, MineHub realized it needed the power of Private Data Collections (PDCs) that became available with Hyperledger Fabric 2. PDCs deliver critical functionality for bringing together a large group of diverse companies with differing needs and commercial interests and allowing them to exchange business critical data in a secure, private, and scalable manner. They would also need the flexibility to add new organizations and manage them dynamically.

Enter KrypC, a company that understands enterprises that want to work together across interconnected workflows need a single version of truth and that blockchain technology can provide this. From the beginning, KrypC has been focused on leveraging Hyperledger Fabric to build technologies that help enterprises adopt and develop blockchain solutions. The team there was working towards addressing the very challenges MineHub was looking to solve through its Hyperledger Fabric layer 2 platform, KrypCore. After a few discussions, it became clear a partnership between them made sense.

KrypC’s configurable KrypCore platform offers the agility to quickly create and add new functionalities to a decentralized system and to deploy them seamlessly in smart contracts. KrypCore offers a unique and unrivalled approach to performing asynchronous system updates and upgrades amongst a wide variety of users operating on entirely different IT infrastructures.

With their toolsets, KrypC is able to offer users of decentralized applications a seamless solution to manage security updates and enable rapid addition of new features. By solving for this challenge, MineHub was able to redirect their focus on the user functionality and business value they wanted to unlock for its customers.

Hyperledger Foundation worked with KrypC and Minehub on a case study that details the business and technical challenges of building a platform that connects thousands of companies of diverse sizes without prior relationships and the roles each company plays in the solution. In addition, the case study delves into why and how the release of Hyperledger Fabric 2.2 was key to getting the MineHub to market and what comes next for the supply chain platform.

Read the full case study here.

Oct 01

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Ledger Leopard Uses Hyperledger Besu to Power a Scale-Up’s New Digital Approach to RTI Tracking

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Besu, Member Case Study, Supply Chain

Most of the products we use and consume every day are transported on Returnable Transport Items (RTI). Durable and reusable, RTIs like crates, pallets and containers allow producers to move goods efficiently and sustainably. However, tracking RTIs is often a logistical nightmare. There are billions of palettes circling around the world, and trillions of total RTIs on the move.

When Milou Klooster joined her family’s Netherlands-based smoked fish company, Vishandel Klooster, she soon discovered how much time, money, and energy her team was wasting on tracking RTIs. When she searched for a solution to this problem, she found there wasn’t any.

She resigned from the company and partnered with consultant Yves du Bois to develop a digital approach to the problem. Together, they founded RTI Blockchain. Their aim: a reliable app that connects all members of the supply chain together in one dashboard and provides a real time overview of the status of their RTIs.

Working with blockchain-as-a-service company Ledger Leopard, they developed the RTI Dashboard—a simple and reliable way to manage load carrier administration. Using blockchain technology, the RTI Dashboard gives poolers, suppliers, shippers, and receivers real time insights on their RTI data and enables them to share information privately and transparently. Every link in the supply chain is connected, and the interface is as intuitive as mobile banking.

When it came time to consider a platform, the Ledger Leopard team first considered Ethereum Liberty because it allows for private transactions. Then they considered Hyperledger Fabric. They also considered a combination of Ethereum and Hyperledger.

Ultimately, they chose Hyperledger Besu, an open source Ethereum client for developing enterprise applications that need secure, high-performance transaction processing in a private network.

One key goal was making sure the RTI Dashboard was as easy and intuitive as online banking. Users don’t need to know anything about blockchain to use it. Registration for all users is free. There is no subscription fee, no maintenance and support fees, no cost whatsoever for users. Senders pay per item they ship over the platform at a rate of 0.0005 euros per item.

Once a company registers in RTI Dashboard, they can invite their partners to join with a link. Once the partner clicks on the link, they’re invited to explore the platform and how it works, all at no charge.

RTI Blockchain suggests users start small. “Take one supplier and use RTI Dashboard for all transactions. Once they see what the system can do for them, they’re more willing to move their entire RTI administration process to the system,” says co-founder Yves du Bois.

Hyperledger worked with RTI Blockchain and Ledger Leopard on a case study that details the goals and approach for building this solution, the growing feature set that users are helping to shape and the next opportunities the start-up is eyeing for this dashboard.

Read the full case study here. For more details, tune into the Wednesday, October 20, discussion with Olivier Rikken of Ledger Leopard on supply chain traceability.

Jul 29

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Enterprises Can No Longer Take Shortcuts with Climate and Social Impact, and Distributed Ledgers Provide Proven Accelerators for Change

By Anthony Day, Blockchain Partner, IBM Blog, Climate, Hyperledger Fabric, Supply Chain

One of the few benefits we have seen emerge from the recent COVID-19 pandemic is an amplification of focus and desire for accountability around corporate and government sustainability, or “ESG” (Environmental, Social and Governance) metrics.

However, sustainability must move beyond commitments and transition into action. Sustainable action. Sustainable from process, technology and commercial standpoints; and helping those in a position of power (who have not traditionally been used to prioritising investments based on ESG metrics) to make difficult choices to drive action.

Furthermore, as we look at “earth system” trends like CO2 emissions, surface temperature, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss and many others we see exponential increases in harm and damage over recent years. In other words, acceleration.

Speaking of action, if we are to make any dent in these exponential trends, we need to aim for a more profound impact than incremental improvements to individual corporate metrics such as a10% reduction in plastic packaging, 15% increase in use of recycled materials or move to hybrid vehicle fleets. Aiming higher and working together across entire value chains is key and so is creating systems that enable collaboration, tracking, reporting and remuneration. The latter is important as businesses must remain commercially sustainable, or we will not see participation and investment amongst small and medium-sized enterprises..

Despite what some vendors say , there is no “single app” that addresses the wide spectrum of sustainability requirements as the use cases are varied and more will emerge.

Many corporations are embarking on internal “data gathering” exercises to assess their Scope 1 emissions (direct emissions from owned or controlled sources) so they can have a fact base from which to then take action in a couple of years. Often they are quietly hoping Scope 3 emissions (other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain) will go away. In my opinion, this approach is far from the immediate and meaningful “action” needed to drive change.

At the core, we need to enable more connected supply chains from which we can develop and co-create applications that share, automate, track and integrate with a multitude of different processes and IT systems.

Blockchain and distributed ledgers have proven themselves to be appropriate architectures for these multi-party platforms as they bring together identity, standards, automation of activity, aggregation of data, scalability, transparency and, importantly, incentivisation. That’s a lot more than just a “fancy data store.”

We can re-use or take inspiration from existing multi-party systems that are already addressing known climate and social issues, work together as networks of companies to have greater impact. And we can start today, not in two years’ time when we’ve completed our internal data audit.

Here are some examples of where distributed ledgers, and Hyperledger Fabric in particular, are already being used to address ESG issues that are cross-industry, cross-border and can be used as impact accelerators.

Waste Reduction – Nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted each year (source: United Nations): IBM Food Trust originated as a platform for managing food safety, but the data stored on the platform across farmers, transport companies, manufacturers and retailers allows for more granular tracking of freshness, dwell time, conditions in storage and transit, which can be used to optimise distribution, reduce waste, and even extend shelf life.
Material Circularity – Production of materials we use every day account for 45% of the CO2 emissions (source: EuroParl): Plastic Bank has created a circular economy platform around collection, processing and sale of “Social Plastic” to large manufacturers, with a focus on empowerment and financial reward for collectors in developing countries. Mitsui and Asahi Kasei have also recently announced development of DLT-based circularity marketplaces to record, track and incentivise their suppliers and customers to increase re-use of plastic and chemical feedstock and provide transparency to regulators where taxation of imported plastics is coming into force.
Social Impact – Almost half of consumption-related emissions are generated by just 10% of people globally (source: Project Drawdown): Farmer Connect has its origins in traceability of commodities such as coffee and cocoa and provision of self-sovereign identity applications for farmers. Interestingly, Farmer Connect is using its “first mile” digitisation expertise to bring customers (and brands) closer to social impact projects in developing countries and enable crowdfunding of local projects.
Renewable Energy Consumption – Share of renewables in global electricity generation was 29% in 2020 (source: IEA): Renewables present an opportunity for low-cost, abundant energy but have challenges in scaling, particularly in balancing supply and demand. Equigy is a multi-country “crowd balancing” platform comprising energy companies in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. Equigy uses blockchain technology to access, via aggregators, new sources of electricity from the owners of consumer-based devices and is working towards incorporating use of decentralised storage with private or commercial vehicles and batteries.
Carbon Capture – In practice, some sectors will simply not be able to achieve net-zero emissions without carbon capture (source: IEA): Newlight Technologies recently launched a range of “regenerative, carbon-negative” fashion products made from air-captured carbon, and with the origin of the carbon capture and authenticity of individual products stored and traceable on a distributed ledger. While manufacture of sunglasses is not analogous to all sectors, the ability to track, certify and share material properties in increasingly regulated supply chains is becoming a critical core competence and can be a further step towards scaling voluntary carbon markets.

The important factor here is not that blockchain applied to these domains solved a problem but rather that these climate and social issues are multi-party problems that require entities, activities and processes to be supported by technology to drive and sustain change.

Hopefully, in this article we have demonstrated that the problems are clear, real and addressable; that multi-party collaboration platforms are feasible to implement; and that there are technology accelerators available to enterprises and governments that are proven and scalable. So there should be no further cause for inaction…

Cover image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Jul 26

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How innovative supply chain solutions can increase blockchain adoption

By Naresh Jain, Co-founder/COO, Snapper Future Tech Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Supply Chain

Challenges in Supply Chain

Supply chain processes are complex and involve many players, heavy documentation and large data sets. Businesses across supply chains work in silos and communication between them is largely through email or phone calls causing issues related to efficiency and costs, data availability and redundancy, transparency and reconciliation, and fraud and trust.

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Blockchain Use Cases in Supply Chain

With the advent of blockchain technology, CEOs and CIOs have paid increasing attention to mitigating industry challenges through technology adoption. Supply chain focus area are

Track and trace of assets through supply chain
Provenance to find origin or authenticity of products
Circular economy to reduce carbon footprint by secondary use or recycling products
Customer engagement through loyalty programs using tokenization
Financial transactions through crypto tokens and smart contracts
Automation by capturing and recording data of physical movements using IoT or from different sources.

Blockchain Success Stories in Supply Chain

There are various case studies and success stories that have proved the potential impact of blockchain technology across a number of supply chain use cases:

Mumbai Transport implemented TradeLens to boost efficiency and cut costs

~50% improved communication efficiency of documents like commercial invoices, bills of lading
Lower transport and logistics costs
Shorter lead time and less frequent delays

Walmart brought transparency to food supply chain

Time needed to trace their provenance went from 7 days to… 2.2 seconds!

Chainyard and IBM reduced new vendor risk and drastically cut onboarding

Vendor onboarding cycle time cut from 60 days to 3 days
For buyers: 50% less cost to verify and maintain a supplier’s information
For sellers: much faster time to first sale

Honeywell Aerospace built an online parts marketplace

$4 million in sales in less than a year
Purchase time reduced from days to minutes
Future boost to anti-counterfeit measures

DLTLabs and Walmart eliminated the root problems that caused invoice disputes

Reduction of invoice disputes from 70% to 1.5%
The error threshold for each transaction went from $10 per invoice to $0 per invoice.
Timeline to approve carrier invoices from 6-8 weeks, but often extended over many months, went to less than one week.

Mindtree reinvented its loyalty platforms and merchant onboarding

Merchant onboarding time reduction from more than 20 days to one day
Higher visibility to all parties in the transactions
Eases merchant renewal processes
Standardized AML & KYC processes
Increased cost savings due to automation

Siam Cement Gp saw procure to pay process time cut by 50% and cost reduced to 70%

Blockchain Frameworks in Supply Chain

Most of the supply chain projects are implemented using Hyperledger frameworks, especially Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation hosted by Hyperledger, which is part of the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric is a secure and scalable open-source distributed ledger platform developed with permissions and privacy as its core tenets. Unlike permissionless, distributed blockchains, Hyperledger Fabric leverages a modular architecture that provides enterprises plug-and-play solutions for private transactions and confidential contracts within a network of multiple vendors. This allows an organization to bring together all the stakeholders within its multi-partner ecosystem under one architecture to automate and implement universal workflows across the network.

Hyperledger Fabric is a mature framework that is well suited to deliver low latency, high throughput, and fast send rates along with privacy controls needed for supply chain solutions.

Current State of Blockchain Adoption in Supply Chain

Blockchain benefits are quite visible in the above mentioned success stories. That is why there are many initiatives going on for supply chain-related implementations of blockchain across industries. But it is taking time for these projects to go into production. According to Gartner, “80% of Supply Chain Blockchain Initiatives Will Remain at a Pilot Stage Through 2022.”

Snapper has been working with customers across industries for supply chain solutions. We follow a robust process-of-implementation approach to blockchain, and use a design thinking process to identify the right use cases and the benefits the customer would get. We realized that the customers are very enthusiastic about the use of technology as part of their digital transformation. However, the understanding level of the technology is very limited for most of the customers before engaging with us. Through our design thinking process, customers get to have a good understanding of how blockchain works, what are the benefits and the implementation challenges. One of the major challenges supply chain leaders realize is that building an ecosystem/consortium of stakeholders is a requirement for a blockchain network. As developing an ecosystem is a difficult task and involves high risk, customers are cautious about investing in such solutions and thus delay the decision to implement blockchain solutions. They are in a dilemma whether to take a lead in creating the network or be part of the existing network. Also there are only limited options available for an organization to join an existing blockchain network for their industry. Customers want to see more and more success stories to validate their decisions.

What is Needed For Faster Adoption of Blockchain Technology

Implementation of blockchain technology not only helps organizations achieve digitalization goals but also creates opportunities for new business models. An organization has to decide whether it wants to grab this opportunity of taking the lead in creating a new consortium, driving new business models and increasing efficiency by adopting blockchain now, or wait for the technology to mature and be a follower.

Only large-scale enterprises can influence implementation of complex supply chain solutions. It is very difficult for medium and small-scale enterprises to create a blockchain-enabled supply chain network.

Faster adoption of blockchain can be achieved through the network effect by inclusion of all sizes of enterprises, faster implementations, cost-effective solutions, more and more success stories and maturity of the technology.

Snapper Future Tech is working on an innovative supply chain traceability solution designed to help the community achieve faster adoption. Snapper’s supply chain solution, SnapChain, is designed to empower an enterprise to create its own network without any major investment or risk. Business networks can be small or big, and can be led by any organization throughout the supply chain. Onboarding a business partner on the network is easy and flexible. This is being achieved by creating a metamodel architecture with configurable modules, transactions types and transaction screens

SnapChain Architecture

SnapChain architecture gives an organization the flexibility to host a node and have its own network of partners with a dedicated ledger using a private channel to maintain data privacy. Each organization has one endorsing, one committing peer and one ordering node. Each transaction is endorsed by Snapper peers and organization peers. Smaller organizations can be part of a common organization maintained by Snapper.

Cover Image Copyright Thai Subsea Services Ltd.

Oct 28

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Hyperledger-powered supply chain solutions in action

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Supply Chain

As 2020 has shown, supply chains are both vital and vulnerable, underscoring the need for trust and transparency. To meet that need, blockchain is playing an increasingly prominent role in many supply chains, and Hyperledger technologies underpin most of the biggest and best known networks, including FoodTrust and TradeLens.

But there are many other examples of Hyperledger technologies in action in the supply chain space. Read on for details about a range of #HyperledgerSupplyChain solutions that are powering supply chains and the businesses that rely on them:

Accenture’s True Supplier Marketplace

Inaccurate supplier master data and incomplete risk assessments cost businesses an average of 15 million dollars per year. What if onboarding a vendor and managing their data could be done more effectively to ensure compliance? Imagine a solution where onboarding times drop from weeks to hours, while adherence to risk assessments improves.

With this supply chain transformation in mind, Accenture used Hyperledger Fabric to develop a double-sided procurement marketplace to source, onboard and maintain supplier relationships. By giving suppliers ownership of their own data, the solution creates a shared source of truth between parties that improves risk compliance, speeds time to onboard, and removes the manual effort required to maintain siloed systems. Accenture’s True Supplier Marketplace is live and available now.

DL Freight™

Developed by DLT Labs, DL Freight™ is the national standard for freight invoice management for Walmart Canada and its national network of third party transportation companies or carriers. The system tracks deliveries, verifies transactions, and automates invoices in real time across the network of up 70 different carriers in Walmart’s supply chain.

DL Freight is built on Hyperledger Fabric, an open source platform that allows Walmart to bring together the carriers within its multi-partner freight operations under one architecture to automate and implement universal workflows across the network. At the same time, through Hyperledger Fabric’s unique “channels” feature, the solution allows independent and protected relationships for each organization directly between itself and Walmart, and the information is not accessible to other members.

Within DL Freight, carriers are the peers, and the governance of the platform is controlled by the applicable contracts, as in any conventional business. The difference is that the freight, legal, and finance departments of Walmart, as well as all the carriers, have all agreed that the solution fairly and accurately represents those agreements so it processes them automatically. As a result, it has removed the guesswork and any real potential for dispute over the interpretation of agreements.

Telefónica’s e2e Supply Chains

Today’s supply chains are increasingly global and complex with hundreds of companies involved in the manufacturing and distribution of products and with logistics that expand across borders. In this context, collaboration has become key to streamline operations. To manage the complexity, Telefónica launched a project to transform the way it collaborates with third parties by blockchain-enabling its e2e Supply Chain solution to make it faster, simpler and more efficient.

Trust is at the heart of that collaboration, and, to build that trust, Telefónica selected Hyperledger Fabric as the underlying technology that serves as a secure and transparent single source of truth for all.

Telefónica started using the blockchain-based supply chain solution to support one of its core products – CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) – the routers, decos, and other devices that provide connectivity and services at home to their customers. The company manufactures over 15 million serialized devices a year that are then distributed and installed by a field force of over 30,000 technicians.

Telefónica put this blockchain platform for operations into production in 2019 in Brazil, where the program delivered ROI in under six months.Telefónica is planning to extend the use of its blockchain-enabled e2e solution to the rest of its Fixed Operations and other products in the coming months.

Trust Your Supplier

Just named as the 2020 Winner of Blockchain Revolution’s Innovative Entrepreneurship in Blockchain Award in the Supply Chain Applications category, Trust Your Supplier is an innovative solution developed in a partnership between IBM and Chainyard to address the inefficiencies and risks associated with supplier information management.

During this time of a global pandemic, many buyers are procuring goods and services in the context of a supply constrained situation. This has resulted in substantial challenges in vetting and onboarding new suppliers.

Built on Hyperledger Fabric, Trust Your Supplier provides both a cross-industry network and a blockchain secured platform to speed onboarding and minimize risk.

Blockchain provides cryptographic security that allows suppliers to control access to their single digital identity. Buyers are able to view profiles of their connected suppliers, as well as a timeline of all the various activities that have taken place with this supplier. Writing this information onto the blockchain allows for an immutable record of all the events that have taken place with this supplier and are fantastic for supporting auditing capabilities.

Trust Your Supplier is bringing speed, accuracy and most importantly trust, to supplier information management and the supply chain needs of today’s world.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications in the supply chain market with #HyperledgerSupplyChain this month on social channels. Or get involved with the Supply Chain Special Interest Group.

Cover image by Free-Photos from Pixabay.

Oct 22

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Lessons learned from COVID: The role blockchain can play when supply chain disruptions hit

By Gigo Joseph, Vice President Blockchain Services at Chainyard, and David Post, Ph.D. Managing Director, Trust Your Supplier Network and Customer Success, IBM Blockchain Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

On April 27, 2020, IBM and Chainyard launched Rapid Supplier Connect (RSC), a blockchain-based network designed to help government agencies, hospitals and healthcare buyers to identify PPE suppliers in the United States. The participants included non-traditional suppliers who had pivoted to address the shortage of equipment, devices and PPE supplies needed for COVID-19 relief efforts with a greater efficiency.

The blockchain network, which was launched, free of fees, to help frontline healthcare organizations confidently identify and procure PPE, had unprecedented adoption. More than 500 buyers and suppliers joined in no time to quickly find each other, accelerated verification and onboarding processes, and gained near real-time insights into inventories of life-saving equipment.

Six weeks from ideation to market

During mid-March 2020, when the pandemic hit the United States with unanticipated impact and scale, hospitals found themselves struggling to procure quality and essential PPE equipment needed in the frontline battle. Availability was uncertain, quality was questionable, and trust in suppliers was eroding.

IBM and Chainyard jumped in to help responders to battle the pandemic by launching RSC, leveraging Trust Your Supplier and IBM Sterling Supply Chain Suite, within six weeks.

Trust Your Supplier, owned and operated by Chainyard, is a production blockchain network with trusted source of verified supplier information and digital identity that reduces risk while simplifying and accelerating supplier onboarding and supplier management. IBM Sterling Supply Chain Suite provides inventory visibility and deep insights into supply chain activities.

What are the reasons RSC had such quick adoption and successfully met its objectives? When looking back we identified the following five themes for how blockchain helped when the supply chain disruption hit:

1. Trust was paramount, and that trust will survive the pandemic

When the pandemic hit the supply chain, leading to shortages, price increases and quality distortions that cascaded from factories to ports to suppliers to consumers, the buyers needed a system that could be trusted. Blockchain is known to create trust in the system without any one individual or company in the system ensuring the trust. The trust is achieved through trust in the ecosystem, which included trust on third party verifiers, immutable data, immutable logic and audit trail of supplier information. Trust Your Supplier, the foundation for creating the trust, and previously proven with thousands of suppliers, was the right choice to be quickly leveraged to build trust between buyers and suppliers during the pandemic.

2. Blockchain provides the skeleton for trust; however, it is the ecosystem that brings it to life.

Blockchain provides the skeleton for creating the trust. However, it comes to life and offers greater value when more trusted industry players participate and contribute as validators, verifiers and solution providers working on top of the network. Each blockchain requires the creation of new industry ecosystems in which participants must work together. RSC achieved this through multiple verification agencies helping to generate trust in the ecosystem, including:

Dun & Bradstreet contributed its identity resolution, firmographic data, and supplier risk and viability scores to TYS network.
CDAX served as a third-party paymaster, securing funds on behalf of buyers in a custody and settlement account and holding goods ordered contractually from the supplier under a consignment arrangement until the buyer verifies acceptance of the order and releases funds to the seller.
Project N95 served as a clearinghouse for information on COVID-related suppliers.
RapidRatings provided financial health data on suppliers.
KYC SiteScan provided “Know Your Business” due diligence report access.
Thomson Reuters provided access to its CLEAR customer due diligence tool to provide buyers with access to real-time and comprehensive data to vet suppliers and identify potential fraud risks.

3. Inventory visibility and transparency accelerates on time delivery and adaptation.

When the pandemic caused a shortage of supplies, the buyers’ biggest need from suppliers were inventory visibility and transparency into delivery timetables. The solution was expected to provide real time visibility and transparency across the key supply chain pillars of procurement, manufacturing, transportation, and distribution. In the case of a pandemic, critical supply delivery lead time misinformation could lead to significant loss including lives.

RSC integrated IBM Sterling Supply Chain Suite to provide inventory visibility and deep insights into supply chain activities. Increased real-time visibility helped buyers to pace the PPE orders. The network also helped to identify existing supplies and excess inventory going unused, allowing hospitals to make it available to others and redirect supplies where they were needed most.

4. Simple solutions to solve pain points need to be swift to the market.

Blockchain solutions for supply chain can be very complex, supporting myriad use cases with a large consortium providing the single source of truth. One cannot build these solutions overnight when a pandemic hits. In order to be swift in the market, reuse solutions that are proven and available in the market being used by suppliers over the years. The level of integrations can be daunting and can take years. RSC adopted agility against the features, made integrations simple and was quick to market to address the critical needs.

5. Trusted Digital Identities bridge the trust gap between reality and the digital world.

Blockchain-based digital identity played a major role in creating trust . Digital Identity is about linking real world identities and the digital world. Each physical object’s digital replica (known as a digital twin) is created in a way that prevents or reveals any human interference that alters information. For a digital business transaction on supply chain, it is substantially important to prove the authenticity of one’s own identity and to verify that of the transaction partner. RSC leveraged TYS’s Digital Identity services to issue verifiable credentials associated with a company identity, digitally signed, and thus verified by a trusted party.

Additional aspects of blockchain that also contributed to supply chain resiliency during the pandemic include data privacy, confidentiality of shared data, innovative business models that glue together stakeholders in the ecosystem, and third-party solution integrations that work on top of these ecosystems. With many blockchain supply chain solutions on the rise, and interoperability actively being addressed, our society will have quicker resilience when we encounter the next pandemic.

For more on this topic, tune into a discussion on “Leveraging blockchain to drive supply chain resilience and accountability in the face of climate change and other disruptions” at Open Source Summit Europe at 13:00 GMT, Monday, October 26. The panel will include Chainyard’s Gigo Joseph along with Douglas Johnson-Poensgen of Circulor and Marta Geater-Piekarska of Hyperledger.

More details are here.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications in the supply chain market with #HyperledgerSupplyChain this month on social channels.

Cover image by MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann, CC-BY-2.0

Oct 20

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DLT Labs Turns to Hyperledger Fabric to Resolve Freight Transportation Invoice and Payment Challenges for Walmart Canada

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric

As part of its commitment to provide the lowest everyday prices for its consumers, Walmart Canada has a sharp focus on supply chain logistics. One vital piece: the freight transportation that ensures Walmart is sufficiently stocked to service more than 1.2 million customers across 400 stores every day.

Walmart partners with third party transportation companies, referred to as carriers, that work around the clock, and through all seasons, to deliver goods. These carriers are a vital link in Walmart’s supply chain. However, there is a high level of complexity to managing the information flow and invoice payments with the carriers, which is a big deal as shipping is a capital-intensive business with a high degree of cost volatility (fuel prices, delays, unexpected events).

It is not uncommon to have invoice disputes in the range of 70% or more for every load a carrier delivers (one invoice per load). Despite various service providers trying to solve this puzzle using the full spectrum of existing technologies, disputes continue to plague the industry with high administrative costs and lengthy payment delays, and invoice reconciliation often simply means one side or the other capitulated.

For Walmart, the complexity is multiplied by working with up to 70 different carriers in its supply chain, each of which has its own respective process for calculating shipping costs based on individual contracts that outline varying rates for fuel, line haul and other charges.

Walmart Canada enlisted the help of DLT Labs™, a global leader in the development and deployment of an innovative enterprise-level platform using distributed ledger technology, to develop a solution that would solve the perennial dispute problem once and for all.

In early 2019, DLT Labs rolled out the world’s largest full production blockchain solution for any industrial application: DL Freight™. Remarkably, because the platform is fully configurable, DL Freight was configured for the demanding needs of Walmart in just 60 days. The new system tracks deliveries, verifies transactions, and automates invoices in real time. Reconciliation between Walmart and its fleet of carriers is no longer even necessary because they are all working off the same information and calculations by way of smart contracts.

DL Freight is built on Hyperledger Fabric, an open source platform that allows Walmart to bring together all the carriers within its multi-partner freight operations under one architecture to automate and implement universal workflows across the network. At the same time, through Hyperledger Fabric’s unique “channels” feature, the solution allows independent and protected relationships for each organization directly between itself and Walmart, and the information is not accessible to other members.

Hyperledger teamed up with DLT Labs and Walmart Canada on a case study about the creation and adoption of DL Freight, the national standard for freight invoice management for Walmart Canada and its national network of carriers. It delves into key design decisions and outcomes as well as security safeguards and the roadmap for DL Freight as an industry platform.

Read the full case study here.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications in the supply chain market with #HyperledgerSupplyChain this month on social channels.

Nov 18

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“Why Retail is Ready for Blockchain” – a position paper preface

By Allan Gulley, Auburn University RFID Lab Blog

The supply chain landscape is widely considered to be the most immediate application space for blockchain and DLT technologies for many reasons: tension between trade partners, a plethora of paper-based processes, siloed stakeholders, and inefficiencies everywhere. The use cases are there, and the preliminary steps of launching a pilot or proof-of-concept seem simple enough. After all, over half of the projects in Hyperledger’s Blockchain Showcase have some sort of supply chain flavor, and there have been several successful initiatives featuring leafy greens and coffee beans that have proven the viability and the value of blockchain for the supply chain.

However, we tend to overlook the vast majority of blockchain for supply chain projects that dissolve or fail to deliver results. There are plenty of valid reasons why consortiums collapse or projects disappear into the ether (pun intended). Buy-in from various stakeholders may be lacking, value propositions for the business may be hazy, or use cases could be dismissed after initial exploration deems them unfit. There is no shame in any of these endings, but there are definitely lessons to be learned. Initiatives that are able to survive the exploration phase encounter whole new hurdles once they arrive at the implementation phase, and one of the most prominent problems that supply chain projects face is bridging the gap between the physical world and the digital domain.

Some companies solve this problem by creating home grown identification solutions, volunteering their time and energy to a never-ending cycle of development and support that doesn’t have anything to do with blockchain. Other organizations opt for legacy technologies like barcode to bridge the gap between physical goods and the digital world, but even barcode systems have their limitations. Scanning each product in a customer’s cart to capture the information embedded in each barcode might not be an issue, but this same practice does not scale upstream in the supply chain when products are palletized and carts are substituted for shipping containers. Associations must be made between products, cases, pallets, and containers. Assumptions must be drawn about the accuracy of those associations and the continuity of operations throughout the supply chain. The resulting scenario requires a significant amount of trust in legacy systems, which is typically a red flag for blockchain practitioners.

Another shortcoming of barcode-based systems is that they rely on class-level identifiers, also known as SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit), UPCs (Universal Product Code), or GTINs (Global Trade Identification Numbers). In other words, the data only goes as deep as the item type, meaning that a single value could be assigned to countless identical items. For example, over 350 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold throughout the world since 1980, but their barcodes all bear the exact same information, making it impossible to distinguish one from the other. Because of this fact, it is impossible to determine an item’s singularity with data alone, so additional assumptions must be made in order to confer item integrity. There is, however, an alternative to barcode and other optical scanning solutions that performs at scale throughout the supply chain and solves the issue of item-level identity.

RFID technology (Radio Frequency IDentification) has become a popular solution for many blockchain projects seeking to tie digital IDs to physical goods. RFID is a well established method for serializing and capturing item-level information, and decades of development have contributed to lower costs and peak performance at practically every step of the supply chain. Scanning of RFID-tagged product is accomplished with radio waves, as opposed to barcode systems that rely on lasers and line of sight. Because of this, product information can be captured through packaging, cases, and even pallets at the rate of hundreds of items per second. Additionally, RFID tags assign a unique digital identity to each physical product by appending a serial number to the basic information found in barcodes. This is accomplished by the use of SGTINs, or Serialized Global Trade Identification Numbers. There are other mediums for carrying SGTIN data like a QR Code and 2D Data Matrix, but RFID and other radio-wave-based carriers tend to scale better throughout the supply chain.

Even though RFID is an ideal data source for a blockchain solution, standing up a comprehensive solution from scratch is a non-trivial task. Companies like Nike, FedEx, Delta, and Airbus have spent millions of dollars over the course of several years to establish their RFID capabilities, and while they have reaped sizable dividends, the amount of effort required is far from negligible. Many blockchain initiatives that are supply-chain-centric have come to this realization, and it is not uncommon for projects to experience significant delays or stall out completely when it comes to integrating RFID infrastructure. However, companies that have already invested in RFID are in an excellent position to plug their item-level data streams into a blockchain solution, ultimately enabling visibility and traceability through each step of the supply chain.

While there are robust implementations of RFID in aviation, aerospace, and manufacturing, the industry with the deepest penetration is retail. There are 14 billion RFID-tagged items in the retail world today, from footwear and fine jewelry to sweaters and sweatpants, and over 70% of the top 100 apparel retailers in the U.S. are using RFID in their operations. But ever since Walmart began pushing RFID adoption in the early 2000’s, the industry has suffered from an inability to share granular, item-level data with their trade partners. Traditional EDI networks permit high-level business documentation to change hands, but these networks operate on antiquated models and outdated internet technologies, rendering them unfit for the massive volumes of serialized data being created throughout the supply chain today. End users and solution providers have been unsuccessful in establishing managed server solutions for serialized data exchange, primarily because of the imbalance of control created by centralized solutions or the lack of scalability across the industry.

Given the current retail landscape, there is a tremendous opportunity for blockchain technology to become the de facto standard for data exchange. The Auburn University RFID Lab has expounded on this opportunity and outlined the symbiotic relationship between serialized data and blockchain in a recent position paper titled “Why Retail is Ready for Blockchain.” With item-level infrastructure already in place, retail could be the best arena for blockchain to be battle-tested in. But this opportunity is bigger than a single domain. RFID adoption in other industries is exploding, and those industries key off of the lessons and learnings in retail. If the retail industry is able to prove out the potential of blockchain, others will follow. There is an insatiable need for better business-to-business collaboration across all disciplines, and I believe that blockchain could be the solution to satisfy that need.

Oct 14

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Spotlighting Supply Chain Use Cases

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth

It’s #HyperledgerSupplyChain month so we wanted to spotlight some of the exciting ways Hyperledger technologies are improving traceability, adding efficiencies and building trust in supply chains around the world.

The role of open source enterprise blockchain is well laid out by Target as a mechanism for “ensuring multiparty trust across enterprises doing business together” in this article about the benefits of the technology.

To help boost the #HyperledgerSupplyChain conversation, below are some noteworthy use cases. Chime in on social with your own examples of Hyperledger powering supply chain solutions.

Walmart’s use of Hyperledger Fabric to track food for better safety: When an outbreak of a food-borne disease happens, it can take days, if not weeks, to find its source. Better traceability could help save lives by allowing companies to act faster and protect the livelihoods of farmers by only discarding produce from the affected farms. Using a system powered by Hyperledger Fabric, Walmart can now trace the origin of over 25 products from five different suppliers. The company plans to roll out the system to more products and categories in the near future.

ScanTrust’s use of Hyperledger Sawtooth to bring transparency to the supply chain: To help their client Cambio Coffee bring more transparency to their ethical trade business, ScanTrust used Hyperledger Sawtooth to build a blockchain-enabled traceability function to enhance its supply chain application. Cambio Coffee implemented ScanTrust’s unique QR codes on their packs in May 2018 to an enthusiastic response from customers. Currently, the roaster and the delivery company enter data onto the blockchain. Future plans call for the roll out the feature to the shipping company and, eventually the farmers, to cover the whole supply chain. Customers are also interested in using the platform other blockchain-supported initiatives, like “Tip your farmer.”

Circulor’s first-ever mine-to-manufacturer traceability of a conflict mineral with Hyperledger Fabric: The African country of Rwanda is the world’s biggest supplier of tantalum: a rare mineral used to make capacitors found in devices like smartphones and laptops. To prove beyond doubt that every bag of tantalum ore from Rwanda was mined, transported, and processed under OECD-approved conditions, without any child or slave labor, Circulor created a Hyperledger Fabric-based system to trace tantalum from three mines and an ore-sorting facility in Rwanda. The system is designed to slash the high cost for compliance, satisfy regulators, reassure consumers, and build revenues for Rwanda.

To see the full line up of supply chain use cases in the Hyperledger Blockchain Showcase, head here. If you have a Hyperledger-powered supply chain project you’d like to see on this list, please submit it.

We also have an active community for those interested in participating and contributing to supply chain solutions. The Hyperledger Supply Chain Special Interest Group (SIG) represents a global membership of logistics and supply chain professionals united in advancing the state of the supply chain industry through the implementation of enterprise-grade solutions based on Hyperledger technologies.

May 31

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Hyperledger Launches New Supply Chain Special Interest Group

By Hyperledger Blog, Special Interest Group

Hyperledger has launched its sixth cross-industry Special Interest Group (SIG), the Hyperledger Supply Chain SIG, to facilitate focused technical and business-level conversations related to appropriate use cases for blockchain technology across Supply Chain management. The new group will cover a broad range of topics, including logistics, provenance, authentication, track-n-trace, related IoT utilization, and similar inter-related areas of interest. SIG participants will also contribute requirements to Hyperledger’s supply chain project, Grid. Hyperledger Grid intends to provide reference implementations of supply chain-centric data types, data models, and smart contract based business logic – all anchored on existing, open standards and industry best practices.

The distributed ledger of blockchain is already enhancing collaboration among shippers, carriers, and forwarders as well as producers and manufacturers, who themselves represent every industry imaginable. Blockchain is taking on a growing role in ensuring reliable tracking of goods in Logistics and Supply Chain and has the potential to help reduce delays caused by manual, often “paper-based” cross-border, settlement, tracking, and regulatory processes.

There are many challenges to overcome before blockchain elements like DLT and smart contracts can be deployed widely in the logistics and supply chain industry. According to DHL’s research, “Likely the biggest challenge will be achieving successful industry adoption through collaboration and even co-opetition between diverse Logistics and Supply Chain stakeholders that have legacy processes and varying interests.”

The new Hyperledger Supply Chain SIG, led by chair Jay Chugh, Senior Director, Oracle Cloud, and vice chair Joshua Q. Satten, Senior Director of Blockchain (North America), Wipro Limited, is designed to address some of these challenges by bringing the collective wisdom of the community in a vendor-neutral, open source manner, using the various available components of the overall Hyperledger open-source blockchain framework.

This SIG will serve as a platform for the community to share knowledge and build collaborative efforts, learning from each other’s experiences, successes, and challenges. The potential for blockchain in Logistics and Supply Chain will be predicated by moving from concepts and pilot applications to viable deployable solutions, built on lessons learned via open collaboration.

“Blockchain is a game changer for Supply Chain transparency and efficiency. Hyperledger’s Supply Chain SIG aims to harness the collective wisdom of experts in blockchain and supply chain to collaboratively bridge the gap between real world and theory, and advance the adoption of Hyperledger blockchain in supply chain.” – Sarabjeet (Jay) Chugh, Senior Director, Oracle Blockchain, and SC-SIG Chair

The Hyperledger Supply Chain Special Interest Group

The Hyperledger Supply Chain Special Interest Group (SC-SIG) represents a global membership of logistics and supply chain professionals united in advancing the state of the supply chain industry through the implementation of enterprise-grade technology solutions utilizing the Hyperledger greenhouse of business blockchain frameworks and tools.

The activities of the Supply Chain SIG will include:

Identifying related reference architectures (for example business and integration architecture, technical and infrastructure architecture), frameworks such as Hyperledger Grid, and models (OSI), use cases, current pilots and proofs of concept, and production case studies;
Sharing stories of successes, failures, opportunities and challenges;
Exploring and addressing cross-cutting architectural principles, options and decisions like performance and scalability, security, identity management and privacy, and identity in logistic contexts;
Identifying existing or needed common critical software, middleware, and hardware components that would serve the particular needs of supply chain.
Working towards proposing solutions to the problems identified;
Identifying conferences or other opportunities to connect face to face, as well as submit talks or present as a group at an event;
Identifying the business community and building an inclusive platform for early adopters to contribute with their experiences;
Identifying all different protocols across supply chain to build standardization across the different parties and efforts; and
Supply Chain best practices, awareness of and working in accordance with such rules as customs & import export regulations.

“Addressing distributed & decentralized frameworks for enterprise and cross-industry Supply Chain management is a truly unique need that will be addressed through this new Hyperledger SIG. What makes this special is the confluence of players coming together to advance standardization and adoption including those from transportation, logistics, and major companies from just about every major industry you could think of; whether you’re in consumer goods, technology, aviation, commodities, or just about any other non-virtual business, a company’s supply chain is something that exists as the core of both of its current profitability and its future desired operating model.” – Joshua Q. Satten, Senior Director of Blockchain (North America), Wipro Limited, and SC-SIG Vice Chair

How to get involved in Hyperledger Special Interest Groups

SIGs gather community members from an industry segment to work on domain-specific problems and create an environment for open discussion, document co-creation and solution proposals. SIGs help specific vertical markets in their efforts to address problems specific to that particular community. Hyperledger now has six SIGs, including ones focused on healthcare, telecom and social impact.

Participation in any SIG is open to everyone in the community. Each group has an open e-mail list, a Chat channel, and a wiki page. Live meetings are also held regularly via web teleconference. When needed, a task force can also be created within the SIG and have working sessions to discuss specific work items.

If you’re interested in joining the Supply Chain SIG, please subscribe to the mailing list and join the Chat channel where meeting details will be announced. You also can visit https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/SCSIG or find a list of other community meetings on the Hyperledger Community calendar. We look forward to your participation and contributions!