Taraxa: the blockchain missing link in enterprise resource planning.
To meet the COVID19-driven operational challenges, enterprises need to adopt new agile tools to optimize their ERP systems.
With coronavirus drastically changing the way we work, we’re all on the look-out for best-performing tools for managing operational assets. Leveraging blockchain’s capability to build an immutable audit log of critical operational transactions can help to bridge the confidence gap between internal and external risk management frameworks.
In this blog, we’re looking at how solutions built on top of Taraxa’s blockchain ledger help to mitigate operational risks and promote efficiency across the enterprise departments.
Show me the data.
Comprehensive ERP software and regular risk assessments present a growing challenge for the enterprise because they lack reliable tools to capture critical operational data. The abundance of irrelevant, inaccurate data with no chance to verify the input/output source and data access log invades the enterprise clouds. Bad data equals a lack of operational insights, ungrounded decisions, and poor project performance as a result. It leads to bad, irrelevant operational insights and hinders innovation in corporate departments.
The root of the problem is essentially bad data-sharing practices. Unstructured communication between the team members, the complexity of line-of-business apps, people switching between their inboxes, Salesforces, and Slacks only to realize later that the critical docs requested by a third-party for the purpose of due diligence cannot be placed. Even the data that does get captured through the internal collaboration suites like SAP or Salesforce has one unsolved problem — it cannot be used for operational audits and regular risk assessments because it lacks the source of authority. To make this data credible for external stakeholders, we will need to turn to employ the external validators like professional auditors or even engage in court procedure, which is very costly and time-consuming.
As a result, the confidence gap in critical operational data needed for remote processes to go uninterrupted and risk-free is growing.
Blockchain’s promise for remote risk management.
‘The bottom line is, blockchains are just another data source to integrate’. Gartner: Top 3 Blockchain and Data Management Myths
To narrow this gap, we need to be able to confidently collect and audit business ops data. While there is a broad array of misconceptions surrounding the blockchain’s ability to transform the enterprise data integrity, the technology does deliver the layer of trust to remote process management.
Trustless data validation & scaling.
While blockchain alone can’t build comprehensive data integrity, its open-source algorithms deliver trustless data validation and scaling. In a distributed ledger, each node independently hosts and updates project status data. No single party in this system can alter or change this data, and, in turn, the entire project team will reference to this single source of truth. This basic blockchain quality can be used for tracking every record and event that happened on the project, which is especially useful when investigating discrepancies and disputes with external project stakeholders like clients or subcontractors. Which brings us to our next point.
100% trusted project log.
Smart contracts running on a blockchain offer the 100% certainty in the project event log ultimately delivering a large number of optimizations to remote operational risk management.
- Automating transactions related to subcontractors’ terms and conditions (e.g. invoices and payments when deliverables are accepted or milestones are met)
- Recording project performance data (e.g. project or phase authorization/closure, team members assignments, time and expense sheets approvals, activity, and tasks progress or completion records).
- Registering project status reports.
The last point is particularly important since there is a high correlation between project success and effective monitoring. Project status at a given date can be modeled with public information (that all stakeholders have access to) and with confidential information (available only for the project management team). Unlike confidential project status records that are difficult to generalize, public project status records, on the other hand, are easy to generalize if we include general project information such as the current project stage, project’s health check, baseline performance (scope, schedule, cost) and the change-log. A blockchain ledger can be used to verify public project status records and generate trustless project status reports.
FIG.1: Using blockchain to validate project status reports.
How Taraxa helps to mitigate operational risks through credible data collection.
Taraxa’s platform lets the end-users easily capture the critical sign-offs and rejections on the projects’ milestones and confidently share them with external stakeholders. Our solution adds a much-needed layer of credibility to remote risk management by using blockchain as the source of auditing authority.
Its powerful integration capabilities help to collect and track operational data shared across disparate messengers, collaboration suites, and line-of-business apps. Keep all critical operational records in one place and share links to credible audit logs with the contract parties, regulators, and other third parties requesting the information. Anchored to the blockchain ledger, the audit reports are 100% credible and easily accessible by external partners for due diligence purposes. They will be able to immediately view the data without any other sophisticated access controls.
The platform’s architecture makes it possible to retain operational records from a wide variety of input sources — from emails and PDFs to hardware IoT modules and features a number of useful functionalities such as categorizing data with tags and status visualizations.
