Encoding Trust that Travels with Data — A New Product Introduction Case Study Powered by Solutions Design with Transmute
This case study describes supply chain innovation work completed by GS1, GS1 US, and GS1 Canada and Transmute during the second half of 2021.
About GS1: GS1 is a neutral, not-for-profit organisation that develops and maintains the most widely used global standards for efficient business communication. GS1 is best known for the barcode, named by the BBC as one of “the 50 things that made the world economy”. GS1 standards improve the efficiency, safety and visibility of supply chains across physical and digital channels in 25 sectors. GS1’s scale and reach — local Member Organisations in 115 countries, 2 million user companies and 6 billion transactions every day — help ensure that GS1 standards create a common language that supports systems and processes across the globe. Find out more at www.gs1.org
About Transmute: Transmute is a US-based technology company that uses next generation identity and credentialing technologies to provide comprehensive solution design and software to define, digitize, and share verifiable data at scale. Transmute partners with innovative enterprises and governments to build digital trust ecosystems where this data can be securely exchanged across diverse stakeholders and technology vendors. Transmute specializes in trusted information about global supply chain products, actors, and transactions.
Project Overview
In 2021, GS1 and Transmute worked together to test the business and technical feasibility of combining GS1 standards with Verifiable Credentials for product-related claims.There was mutual interest in moving from theory to practice to illustrate the tangible value of leveraging Verifiable Credentials for creating trust that travels with data.
This project was guided by these key questions:
- How can GS1 create trust that travels with data by issuing authoritative information about companies and products?
- How might GS1 Digital Link, Verifiable Credential, and Decentralized Identifier standards be leveraged together to create business value related to product claims?
Through our collaboration we discovered particular value in the area of new product introduction — or the process of procuring new products as a retailer. As consumers we rarely think about how the things we buy arrived on the physical (or virtual) shelf. Behind the scenes it can take months for retailers and brands to establish relationships, validate products, complete distribution, and ensure quality before making those goods available to consumers. We found multiple opportunities to improve the speed and security of these processes by leveraging Verifiable Credentials in conjunction with GS1 standards and identifiers.
Solutions Design Process: GS1 + Transmute Collaboration
Our companies worked through a step-wise approach to move from broad theory to a targeted application of our combined technologies for new product introduction.
Collaborative working sessions including GS1 experts and the Transmute team were conducted over several months to identify the most feasible and impactful possibilities. We drew from the international standards, supply chain, and technical expertise of GS1 team members. Transmute combined this information with our decentralized technologies expertise to propose specific credentials, workflows, and businesses narratives to address the product claims focus. These solutions are technically supported by the Transmute platform and open source libraries.
Our group went through multiple iterations as a part of early solution design work. This stage includes detailed business narratives for a variety of supply chain use cases, workflow mapping, brand interviews, sample credentials, and early prototypes, culminating in a Solution Design Report. This phase of work ultimately drove the narrowed focus to the new product introduction use case as the highest value opportunity for illustration of immediate industry value.
Next we built a Proof-of-Concept demonstration — including an interactive prototype and technical libraries — to show how these credentials can be issued, exchanged and verified seamlessly across brands. You can see the prototype in action here:
New Product Introduction Description
The following written description provides further detail about the business story portrayed in the video above. If you already watched the video you can also jump to the subsequent section.
Brand Healthy Tots wants to sell its natural baby food products for the first time with retailer Sell Anything & Everything (SA&E). SA&E will start by selling the Healthy Tots product in its online store, with the future possibility of also selling it in brick and mortar locations.
Typically new product onboarding is a lengthy process, requiring submission of PDF documentation and requesting data from a variety of parties, often leading to duplicated costs and effort. These documents and sites are also very easy to fake, giving false confidence in product claims.
Healthy Tots provides SA&E with verifiable evidence of its GLN and the product GTINs, and the process kicks off instantly. SA&E uses the GS1 Digital Link resolver to immediately discover locations of all related product information. SA&E’s system can then request relevant information from the associated locations, providing evidence where needed that it is authorized to do so. For example, it is able to request third party issued organic certification, allergen information, and product images.
SA&E receives this information in the form of Verifiable Credentials signed by the original issuing parties, and is able to confidently populate the new product listing. SA&E can do so automatically because the issuer of the information can be identified and confirmed, allowing data they issue to be passed through relatively unknown or untrusted parties like Healthy Tots systems. The SA&E system can even automatically check that the issuing parties possess appropriate accreditations and/or GLNs to make sure such statements about the product are authoritative. This includes going all the way back to GS1 Global as a root of trust.
Healthy Tots can fill in any additional product details that SA&E needs, and the product can be listed for sale within minutes. Relevant pieces of verifiable information such as certified organic and allergen information can also be passed through to the consumer’s view, providing deeper confidence in the legitimacy of the product and associated accreditations.
Testing Business Benefits
This novel approach to sharing product data can lead to the following benefits:
- Reduced administrative burden and faster timeline from engagement to product on shelves.
- Automation for the retailer, working with hundreds or even thousands of vendors and tens of thousands of products. This protects brand reputation and allows elevation to human review when risk is detected.
- Unambiguous documentation requirements that meet regulatory needs and further speed up processes.
- More broadly, an encoded process for establishing trust in data that persists across systems, data pools, and unknown intermediaries.
One of the next steps for this work is deeper testing of these benefits to measure cost savings, efficiency gains and strategic insight.
Building Trusted Ecosystems with GS1
The demo scenario is underpinned by GS1 as a root of trust in the network — continuing a rich history for GS1 in this role. GS1 licenses and identifiers are and will continue to be at the foundation of trusting products and companies. Combining current practices with verifiable credential, decentralized identifier, and GS1 Digital Link standards disambiguating products builds business reputation for just-in-time engagement while keeping information up to date.
We believe that institutions like GS1 are critical in paving the foundations for trusted data to move across ecosystems in the future. Ultimately, trust has to flow from one or more sources whose reputation allows businesses to act with confidence. The advantage of the approach taken in this POC is that the distance between verifiers and root-of-trust organizations can be much greater without losing confidence in the information being presented. As long as the chain of trust retains integrity, the possibilities are endless.
Next Steps
This new product introduction demonstration is now being used to test, validate, break, and refine assumptions about how the involved standards and technologies can best be leveraged to generate value for individual businesses and the broader ecosystem.
“GS1 is moving forward with work to extend existing standards in order to better support the evolving needs of our member companies and create a consistent, common path forward for the scale of digital credentials.” — Melanie Nuce, Senior Vice President, Innovation and Partnerships, GS1 US
“Verifiable Credentials are an exciting opportunity for GS1 to extend its identification system, improve data quality, and secure the supply chain in ways never before possible.” — Kevin Dean, Special Projects Consultant, GS1 Canada
Transmute is working with customers to continue designing, building, and growing digital trust ecosystems — from Solution Design work to bringing businesses onto the Transmute Platform to experience issuance, exchange, and verification of Verifiable Credentials integrated with existing business infrastructure. You can reach out to learn more about working with Transmute here.
Our companies look forward to continued collaboration in the future, and expansion of this important work.
