Baselining the North America Coca-Cola Bottling Supply Chain
Summary: CONA Services (Coke One North America) launches project with Provide and Unibright to establish a “Coca-Cola Bottling Harbor.”
In 2019, the first set of North America Coca-Cola Bottlers adopted blockchain platform based on Hyperledger Fabric, which runs on SAP BaaS platform. The project aimed to streamline the relationship between franchised bottling companies to make cross-organization supply chain transactions friction less and transparent. It was implemented by the tech partner of twelve largest Coca-Cola Bottlers in North America, CONA Services (Coke One North America), and proved to increase transparency and efficiency in bottlers’ intricate supply chain.
CONA now wants to extend the use-case from the internal network to a larger audience. Utilizing the Baseline Protocol, the goal is to establish a “Coca Cola Bottling Harbor”, enabling a low barrier network joining process for Coca-Cola Bottling suppliers. This not only streamlines the ability of internal bottlers-suppliers to provide products to the bottling network, but also external suppliers (e.g. raw materials vendors supplying cans and bottles) can benefit from an integrated, private, distributed integration network.
The Baseline Protocol provides an outstanding technical backbone for achieving the desired solution by:
- using the public Ethereum Mainnet as an always-on, pay-per-use frame of reference;
- keeping enterprise data in traditional systems of record;
- enabling complex, private, inter-organizational business process automation;
- providing extensibility for DeFi & asset tokenization use-cases;
- being openly-governed open source, poised to become an OASIS standard
The relationship between buyers and suppliers results in referencing business objects like Request, Proposal, Purchase Order, Delivery, Invoice and Payment. Currently, various integration related challenges appear:
- purchase orders may often be subject to undesired changes by the supplier — these changes are not noticed by the buyer until receiving the wrong delivery;
- deliveries may be different from the orders due to manual errors on the supplier’s side;
- small participants (without ERP) are prevented from integrating with the ecosystem due to technical and cost barriers.
The project shall prove:
- how a generalized zero-knowledge circuit can be extended and applied to a standardized business process;
- how versioning commercial documents (e.g. purchase order, sales order, delivery, goods receipt, etc.) can eliminate coordination problems by ensuring all parties agree to the latest, authoritative versions;
- how an agreement on the latest baselined version of the “desired truth” can be utilized to negotiate error handling or partial re-deliveries;
- how an accessible technology stack and ERP integration entry point can be made available for all participants;
- how application-specific circuits can be established to enforce nuanced business rules such as verifying the validity of a given buyer-supplier relationship;
- how an invoice can be tokenized within a baseline process;
- how an existing Hyperledger-based implementation can extend, augment or integrate with the Baseline Protocol.
The project is launched by CONA, Provide and Unibright and is scheduled to showcase initial results in Q4 2020.
Read more about CONA: www.conaservices.com
Read more about Unibright Partner Provide: https://provide.services
Unibright is a team of blockchain specialists, architects, developers and consultants with 20+ years of experience in business processes and integration. Unibright turns ideas into businesses, and improves processes with the help of blockchain technology.
Unibright develops enterprise solutions, invests in start-ups, builds process modelling tools and integration platforms and offers a 360° ecosystem around tokenized assets.
Learn more by visiting the Unibright website, Twitter and Medium.
