From Data to Assets: Transforming Global Supply Chains with OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph
Ongoing digital transformation of global supply chains
Organizations have been on a journey of digitally transforming their supply chains for a number of years. This journey was accelerated by the COVID pandemic that highlighted the fragility of global supply chain networks, coupled with a rapid increase in consumer demand and e-commerce volumes. Transformation efforts have been taking place on multiple fronts, such as transparency, sustainability, purchasing, warehouse operations, and trade documentation, to name a few. While progress has been made in each of those areas, we’ve seen few leapfrog advances. There are several reasons for that, ranging from a complex landscape of involved players to siloed and poorly interoperable data that prevents organizations to have a holistic understanding of what’s going on in their supply chain networks.
Even with the slow progression, however, advanced technologies that will enable supply chains to enter and benefit from the metaverse — the fusion of physical and digital worlds — are steadily being adopted.
In one of their reports, Accenture found that about two-thirds of supply chain management executives think that metaverse will have a positive impact on their organization. They see metaverse technologies benefiting organizations in multiple ways, from enabling a better alignment of supply and demand through enhanced customer engagement to facilitating more seamless navigation between physical and digital worlds and providing real-time insights that reduce the gap between supply chain planning and execution. But we still have a lot of work to get there.
OriginTrail — introducing discoverable and verifiable Web3 assets to supply chains
Achieving the vision of fully metaverse-enabled global supply chains requires a strong and paradigm-shifting foundational infrastructure. OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG) brings this required radical change in the way supply chains operate by enabling organizations to transform their data into Web3 assets. To make it easier to understand, Web3 assets in the context of supply chains can be a variety of things:
- Products or groups of products that are flowing along the supply chain.
- Logistics equipment such as shipping containers, trailers, pallets, and other equipment used to handle, transport, and store products.
- Business locations where products are manufactured, transported, stored, and sold.
- Supply chain events describing what happened to products and equipment — we use the GS1 EPCIS 2.0 standard to ensure interoperability.
- Trade documents like Bills of Lading (BL), Airway Bills (AWB), CMRs, Credit notes, Proof of Delivery (POD), Purchase Orders, Invoices, and others.
- Credentials of trade partners such as facility audits and certificates.
- Other relevant supply chain components.
Assets from various supply chain partners on OriginTrail DKG are discoverable, verifiable, and linked, providing a holistic insight into the supply chain network and making it easy to use them in a variety of business applications — anything from track and trace and security monitoring to precise recall management and insurance claims. Additionally, as OriginTrail DKG assets use global data standards such as GS1 EPCIS, W3C Verifiable Credentials, and e-Bill of Lading (eBL), they are interoperable and can be used in any existing IT system that “understands” the standards.
One concern that usually pops up is data privacy and ownership — most of the supply chain data is of a sensitive nature after all. No worries there, as OriginTrail DKG allows a full spectrum of privacy configurations, ranging from assets that are fully private to assets that are fully public, and everything in between. Assets on OriginTrail DKG also incorporate the concept of ownership, as asset ownership can be verifiably transferred from one supply chain partner to another as required. This opens up a world of exciting opportunities for process improvements and new ways to generate value. For example, no more paper handovers of trade documents (such as Bills of Lading) and fuzzy to non-existent audit trails. Or imagine organizations being able to engage with and understand their customers better by transferring ownership of a product in the form of a Web3 asset to them after purchase. The possibilities are endless.
What I described above is not theoretical — OriginTrail DKG is already positively impacting supply chains in different industries. For example, SCAN Trusted Factory uses OriginTrail to safeguard security audits of the largest US retailers such as Disney, Walmart, and Target. AidTrust provides trust and transparency in pharmaceutical supply chains. Trusted Bytes looks at enabling UK Customs to achieve comprehensive shipment risk assessments. And many more are on the way.
Network Operating System (nOS) — where the magic happens
But how do we get from the siloed, fragmented, and poorly interoperable data landscape in supply chains today to discoverable, verifiable, and linked Web3 assets on OriginTrail DKG? Enter Trace Labs’ Network Operating System (nOS), designed to streamline the connection between legacy IT systems (ERP, WMS, LMS, and others) — where data that can be transformed into assets is stored — and OriginTrail DKG.
nOS allows organizations to create, update, and utilize their supply chain assets on OriginTrail DKG from existing data in their IT systems in a simplified way, without the need to deal with complexities usually associated with decentralized infrastructure (e.g. crypto token management is automated with nOS). This is facilitated with three sets of tools within nOS:
- Data ingestion tools, enabling organizations to easily connect nOS to their IT systems and set up automated (API-based) or manual data ingestion, depending on their business requirements. For example, an organization can set up an automated connection to its Transport Management System (TMS), ensuring shipment data is ingested as it becomes available.
- Asset creation tools, allowing organizations to transform their data into discoverable, verifiable, and linked assets on OriginTrail DKG. This set of tools also allows the application of different sets of global data standards (e.g. GS1 EPCIS, W3C Verifiable Credentials, eBill of Lading, eCMR, etc.), ensuring created assets are fully interoperable. For example, an organization that has extracted shipment event data from its TMS can transform that data into GS1 EPCIS 2.0 structured assets.
- Asset querying tools, providing organizations with an easy way to query for assets on OriginTrail DKG for use in their business applications such as supply chain traceability, credential verification, and others. For example, an organization (or multiple organizations in a supply chain network) that has created GS1 EPCIS 2.0 structured assets can set up the necessary queries to utilize those assets in its track and trace application.
With the help of nOS, turning siloed data into discoverable and verifiable assets on OriginTrail has never been easier.
So what’s next?
OriginTrail DKG introduces a new, asset-focused paradigm to global supply chains that can be a significant enabler for a variety of other metaverse technologies, ranging from augmented reality and AI to Internet of Things (IoT) and next-generation digital twins. All these technologies require a strong foundation to deliver business value and this is where OriginTrail DKG plays an important role. And with nOS facilitating the transition from siloed data in legacy IT systems to verifiable Web3 assets on OriginTrail DKG, we are on a strong path towards the vision of metaverse-enabled global supply chains.
