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.