Unibright Diaries — Batch Tracing Template

The previous week we went over The Multi Party Template, and how it can bring efficiency and allow companies to work together even though their legacy systems do not allow such a luxury at the moment. This week’s focus will be on the Batch Tracing Template included in the Unibright Framework.

Traceability and control are possible without the blockchain. However, three major benefits of the blockchain’s integration in supply chains are:

The data cannot be manipulated
The supply chain can secure traceability and control without all participants disclosing all their customers and suppliers to a central party. The level of privacy to enforce can be decided by the participants in the system
The blockchain creates trust in low cost IT solutions. You can use email, Word, mobile phones etc. and still be sure data is accurate. This allows for example rural farmers and independent truck drivers to integrate with the system.

The purpose of a batch tracing implementation is first and foremost to guarantee safety and reliability in the food supply chain. The idea is to keep track of all ingredients of a product (e.g. tonic water) and to be able to track the usage of every ingredient through the complete process of production and delivery to the customer or store.

In the case that an issue in one batch of an ingredient arises (polluted wheat for example), the batch tracing implementation enables the company to “track and trace” the complete network of its usage. It enables the company to determine all finished products, the polluted batch that has been used, and even identify all stores and consumers that have been supplied with theses products.

This greatly helps to bring traceability to the food supply chain network, but still is totally up to the company and the resellers, without paying any attention to the needs of the end customer — and this is where blockchain technology comes in.

Until recently, we helped our customers to solve the challenge of batch tracing through offering centralised databases or cloud-based architectures, collecting all production data and presenting them via a “cockpit” which gives clients access to all this data. By using a blockchain to keep track and trace of where the food comes from, we can offer a secure and trustworthy data storage for all data involved that can be presented to the end consumer. This focus on transparency will surely grant a competitive advantage towards other companies, and guarantee a higher process quality and consumer safety in the end.

By using the Unibright Framework, it becomes easy for business process specialists to make use of blockchain potential. The Batch Tracing Template defines a basic integration workflow which can be customized visually. All that’s needed are the Smart Contracts for a specific blockchain, which are then generated automatically through the Framework.

Existing companies already hold batch tracing relevant data in their existing IT systems. As Unibright’s main focus is business integration, the Unibright Framework automatically creates Smart Adapters to connect the smart contracts to the existing system landscape, therefore not requiring clients to change nor hire developers in order to connect the data on the legacy systems with the blockchain.

A batch tracing process is worthless, if one does not pay attention to the presentation of the collected data. By relying on the Unibright Template, business case specific Smart Queries are created automatically as well. They allow to visually monitor the process and all data flowing in a real-time manner, fulfilling business intelligence needs as well as legal demands.

Using the Unibright Framework and the Batch Tracing Template it offers, the whole lifecycle of defining, publishing, maintaining and monitoring a business process is supported. The smart contracts needed, get generated automatically and the Smart Adapters allow easy integration of the existing systems. Smart Queries offer a unified way to display all data relevant to the process in one place.

Identification of individual grains, beans or bulk commodities often bought on a spot market such as coffea, tea, oils, sugar, and cacao are difficult to track. However, with the blockchain it is possible to track the total volumes bought and sold for each participant in the supply chain. The benefit from using the blockchain is that no central party needs to be trusted in getting all the data on transactions and actors, while still for example let volumes be transparent for everyone in the chain. To exemplify; with the blockchain the volumes of organic soybeans sold cannot be higher than the volume of organic soybeans bought for any party in the supply chain. Also, with blockchain it’s not possible to buy ordinary rice and mix it with a small portion of basmati rice, and sell the entire volume at the higher basmati rice price since the tracked amount of basmati rice going in to the chain can not be higher than the volume going out.

Below, you can find two more examples of how the Batch Tracing Template can be used in the real world.

Tracking of Resources During a Production Process
A manufacturing company in the food industry wants to enable backtracking of all raw materials used in a final product, a bottled lemonade. Parts of this production process are the mixing of basic ingredients delivered by different suppliers and identified by electronically readable lot numbers. The final product is bottled and sold in various tray combinations to resellers and restaurants. By the mention of a unique identifier on each sold tray combination the company wants to be able to name all original lots of the raw materials.

All goods receipts, their usage in the production process and their merging into the final product are inserted into the blockchain as Unibright conformant smart contracts, through the use of the Unibright Framework. Not only has the process been setup seamlessly, but now the locally stored query sets in the Unibright Explorer enable the user to find specific information about lot usage in the production process. The blockchain is both acting as data keeper and as a state machine representing the current state of a production process.

Tracing Beer Batches From the Brewery
Dave loves beer and is interested to learn more about how his beverages were made. He writes to some of his favorite breweries to ask about the origin of their ingredients, but does not receive a reply.

Martin works at a brewery and is tasked with organizing data about ingredients, materials, and the company’s production process. Martin’s brewery wants to give detailed production information to their customers, including Dave, and stakeholders in a secure, transparent, and trustworthy way, without requiring a manual assessment of every bottle shipped.

Through Unibright’s Batch Tracing Template, Martin can visually design a workflow to trace all aspects of their business operations from the origin to end-consumer, update batch information automatically with a smart contract living in a blockchain, map the ERP specific business objects to the structure of the smart contract automatically, and monitor the current state of these process in real time.

Dave is now happy! His favorite brewery established a website where he can enter the batch number of his order and instantly learn the origin and processing time of all ingredients in his beer; an easy task thanks to blockchain based business integration!

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