Blockchain enabled business processes
This article presents an overview on how to use blockchain technology in business processes. Based on proven templates for different use cases, Unibright empowers process specialist without technical knowledge of a specific blockchain to define blockchain related business workflows visually.
From these workflows, the Unibright tools automatically generate:
- smart contracts for various blockchains
- smart adapters to connect to different blockchains and off-chain IT-/ERP- systems
- smart query sets to monitor the ongoing business process
Blockchain Technology
Before looking at the business processes itself, let us state one truth about blockchain technology. It is not the magical solution that will solve any business demand and it cannot be used in any business process. It is an exciting new technology enabling unique features that make sense for some business demands. Before moving on to specifics, let’s give a short sum up on what blockchain is and what makes it hot and unique for business demands:
- Consensus: all parties must agree to network verified transactions
- Immutability: content written to the ledger cannot be altered
- Provenance: records showing the history of each asset exist
- Privacy: permissions and identity ensure appropriate visibility of transactions
With blockchain offering a secured, shared, unalterable ledger for transactions, it streamlines business processes in need of trust, accountability and transparency. Therefore, Smart Contracts represent paper processes in a standardized format and being executed on the blockchain.
The unique features blockchain technology offers, make it possible to re-think business processes. Participants can share transactions and contracts. Trust does not need to be verified, intermediaries, expensive mechanisms und potential vulnerabilities can be overcome. Trust is embedded into business processes and networks.
The advantages of blockchain usage can be summed up:
- Automated, trusted processes (SmartContracts)
- Trusted record-keeping
- Increased and guarenteed trust between parties
- Cost saving by removing intermediaries and overheads
- Reduced risk of tampering, fraud and cyber crime
- Saved time by accelerated transactions
- Improved discoverability
The unique features blockchain technology offers, can be used in specific use cases, for example in business processes doing some kind of tracking&tracing, approval, asset lifecyle and many others applications that can rely on blockchain technology. In upcoming blog posts, we will present specific use-cases, that use a Unibright template to empower a business process making use of blockchain technology.
Conclusion
When adding blockchain to existing IT system landscapes to empower a specific use case, one ends up with business integration. The success of a blockchain implementation will always be measured by the time and costs it produced to be implemented regarded to the benefit it brings to the process.
The Unibright Framework empowers process specialists to focus on the process improvement, without having to solve technical or implementation issues towards this new technology first.
