Bridging the Digital Deserts Along Your Supply Chain
Global supply chains span millions of different interacting parties. This challenges the adoption of digitization; the industry is largely held back by lowest common denominators. Conscious tooling will allow digital front runners to maintain an advantage without disrupting their network.
Transmute is happy to announce a new platform feature, enabling users to “switch” between analog and digital interfaces. Transmute’s Verifiable Data Platform is now primed to bridge the gap between links of varying digital maturity along the supply chain.
Transitional Digitization
It is remarkable how much paper is passed around supply chains. Very often, emailing a PDF is considered “digital”, despite still depending on human consumption. The standard has arrived to change this: the globally recognized W3C internet standard for Verifiable Credentials enables a scalable approach to digitally signed, structured data.
Our Verifiable Data Platform is laser-focused on this mission, enabling actors to digitize their processes and establish cryptography-based trust networks.
But the world will not suddenly flip a switch and go digital overnight. Differences in legislative environments, infrastructure and general digital maturity will make the transition period a long one — years, if not decades. This is the basis of our new platform feature: enabling modern digitization technologies to spread gradually. You can digitize; your network can follow when they are ready.
“Going Analog”
The diagram above illustrates a simple example of bridging a non-digital link of the supply chain:
- A Manufacturer digitally issues a trade document as a Verifiable Credential.
- Down the chain, the origin country customs authority only allows for paper filings. So the VC is converted into a PDF, printed and filed manually.
- The analog document continues downstream the supply chain to the Trade Finance bank. Digitally savvy, the bank scans the QR code, cryptographically verifies the data and injects the structured data into its operational systems.
- For the remainder of the supply chain, the document is exchanged digitally, cryptographically tracing back to the issuing Manufacturer.
This approach was introduced in the UN/CEFACT Verifiable Credentials for Cross Border Trade White Paper:
In a VC based solution to digitising origin claims, certificates and declarations would be issued as VCs but the digital version would also be accessible via a QR on the paper / PDF version so that the same certificate can support different verifier technical maturity. Some verifiers may simply scan the QR with their phone. Others may integrate with their systems and consume the full certificate data.
The security principle here is that the QR encodes a capability URL: anyone holding the PDF or paper version is also granted access to the Verifiable Credential. A data sharing model well suited to supply chain use cases.
Verifiable Trade Documents
Below is an example of such an “analog”, printable trade document. You can access it digitally here — or go ahead and scan the QR code to verify its data!
We are very proud at Transmute to take an active role in the practical transition towards scalable, verifiable supply chain digitization!
Are you ready to digitize, and still respect the pace of your business partners? Sign up for free at platform.transmute.industries.
Nis Jespersen, Transmute’s Solutions Architect, is Editor of the United Nations CEFACT JSON-LD Web Vocabulary project and Author of the W3C Traceability Vocabulary specification.
Transmute holds standards roles including W3C DID Core Author, VCDM 2.0 Editor, VC-JOSE-COSE Editor, W3C CCG Traceability Editor, SCITT, COSE, JOSE Author
Connect with Nis on LinkedIn, Twitter, & GitHub
Sign up for free on Transmute’s Verifiable Data Platform on https://platform.transmute.industries.
