Approval Processes using Blockchain Technology
In our blog post about “Blockchain enabled business processes” we showed how and why business processes can make use of blockchain technology using the Unibright Framework. Today we want to present an approval process — one, including multiple parties.
Use-Case
To give you a real-world example, imagine Sarah, she is a product manager of a casual wear company. She is responsible for the design process of a new hoodie. She has to coordinate all departments and their respective approval on the ongoing design process.
She checks the current approval state in the company’s ERP system and sees that Tom from the Marketing department just gave his final ok on the marketing materials. She sees that the next approval should come from buying department submitting the prime costs.
Anna from the buying department has to keep track of all offers of the different suppliers who would be able to produce the new hoodie. She has to get back to the other departments for detailed questions and only communicate by phone or email, as the suppliers are not integrated into the process due to security reasons.
Challenge
The existing approval process works fine, except the supplier part. Anna has to do all the approval work manually, which is time consuming and error-prone.
How blockchain technology helps
The blockchain can act as a state-machine: secure, reliable and deterministic. The current state of the approval process can be accumulated in a central smart contract which holds the control flow and implicitly decides on the final approval state.
Using the Unibright framework
The “Multi-Party-Approval” Template offers a use case related predefined integration workflow for approval processes which can be customized. Steve from the IT department set up a private blockchain between all suppliers and the company. He designed the integration process visually with the Unibright Workflow Designer. He did not have to write a single line of code — the Unibright Contract Lifecycle Manager generated the needed Smart Contracts. The Unibright Connector integrates the existing ERP by automatically generated Smart Adapters.
Benefit
Sarah is now able to check the current approval state with the Unibright Explorer and is happy to tell Anna and her team that the approval communication with the suppliers are now longer a manual process due to blockchain based business integration! Easy and smart!
