EU Blockchain Summit
The EU Blockchain Summit featured Tomaz, co-founder of OriginTrail, alongside Dan Purtell from BSI and Ken McElroy from Home Depot and SCAN, discussing OriginTrail’s solutions and the future of supply chains. This session is filled with more information than Frictionless International Trade, and I strongly suggest listening to the entire event.
Some notable transcripts from the event are available here.
Dan Purtell, BSI
We have companies actually photoshopping reports and trying to convince some of the biggest retailers in the world such as Home Depot that they carried the credentials necessary for you to go ahead and make a purchase order, and it took investigations actually for us to be able to prove whether or not a factory had the credentials that they claimed to have. We can instantly do that now with the SCAN blockchain solution powered by OriginTrail TraceLabs and it’s quickly becoming a best practice within our association.
I think what we have with the decentralized knowledge graph is proper plumbing to open up to other ecosystems down the road and gonna be quite easy to do that so the US Department of Homeland Security, Customs, and other associations we’re currently in discussions with where we can provide those blockchain components from a factory audit and share that openly to be a deeper trusted provider.
What we’ve been able to do with this is actually bring trust to these factory programs on very important matters of supply chain security, counter-terrorism programs, post 9/11 programs that date back to 2001.
What it allows us to do is to neutrally and in a GS1 format go ahead and demonstrate who in the supply chain is certified or not, providing that digital trust. Initially, it’s associated with the factory itself but in the future, it could be associated with products, could be associated with transparency of goods in the supply chain and I think that’s absolutely where we’re heading. It avoids the common human errors that we see quite commonly there and really, I think what it did for SCAN is it demonstrated their ability to pioneer and to be visionary in a very untrusted world of supply chain and procurement. So we went forward with that. Ken and I actually presented this in Washington DC and we believe it is a very good use case.
An AEO is an authorized economic operator, somebody that has been certified to trade facilitation financial integrity and you can also extend that to security. What this allows us to do is to demonstrate the credentials via blockchain but getting down to the next level not just whether a factory is certified but what is the factory putting in the supply chain? And what does that look like from a certification, a transparency, and a trust perspective? So, we have the AEO client which would be the different factories throughout the EU or globally, and then our customs risk analysts that are working in this database to understand what’s in the supply chain and what it looks like. And again, we’re using the decentralized knowledge graph to go ahead and take those different data silos to string those together to tell that story.
So, we do take AEO compliance data and we put that into the knowledge graph via a self-assessment. We’ve got documentation on corrective actions and the certifications and credentials that the actual factory or supplier has been certified to. We’re using the decentralized knowledge graph to take those different data silos to string those together. The geographical risk data we also use here in an authorized economic operator program that BSi is known for. It’s the largest supply chain risk management intelligence software on the globe. What we do is we take that certification and we look at the risk associated with compliance and we overlay that with geographical risk threat indicators that we track around the globe, including food safety scores.
Primarily what this use case is about is food going from southern Europe into the United Kingdom. So we’re using it to track a couple of different things including risk. Inspection data goes into the graph as well as factory and warehouse audits, supplier audits, truck, trailer, container information, so we can provide that chain of custody and the traceability, and lastly some of the shipment level data. All of this goes into a solution called Connect Screen, this is a solution that’s the largest supply chain security and compliance software in the world and with that, we’re actually tracking different compliance indicators through there, so all of this goes in there. We crunch it to the knowledge graph, it’s blockchained, and it’s formatted. From a permissioned perspective, some of the customs agents would have access to this information or the AEO client would probably have a broader level of access to it.
In understanding decentralized technology, knowledge graphs, decentralized knowledge graphs, it can be a bit complex. What I’m excited about is just how companies like the Home Depot, like the SCAN Association itself, are willing to go ahead and experiment.
I think what we’ve demonstrated very clearly is practical applications to blockchain technology, to a decentralized knowledge graph. I mean this is real-world stuff we’re talking about here. Digital trust is the real world. These are solving modern-day problems. It’s not hype. it’s actually bringing a lot of trust in.
I get to meet with a lot of big companies and I know this technology resonates.
I think it’s helping us tell the true story and we’re building these different ecosystems that are only going to get stronger as we connect them with other ecosystems, so I’d just like to thank Ken for being a wonderful partner in this and a big supporter and a visionary with that.
I’d also like to thank my friends from OriginTrail TraceLabs for really making it easy. I think you’ve made a beautiful product for us. It’s working, and I only look forward to future use cases.
Dan Purtell also released a “teaser” during the event where he is disclosing that BSI is in talks with a very large footwear company. Below is the transcript:
I’m having discussions right now with a very large footwear company and they would like a consumer to be able to go to their product, to scan something, and from that perspective be able to tell the story for that product, to be able to tell the story in terms of the fact that they’re socially responsible, there’s no child labor in that factory, that they’re certified to these different programs, that the factory uses renewable energy whatever % it may be, or recycled materials.
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