How it Works
The Provenance Chain™ Network was built to deliver Transparency as a Service (TaaS) for companies that need to add transparency, traceability and provenance to their supply chains.
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Your visibility, as you look up the supply chain, requires your suppliers to make data transparent to you. Our unique solution uses a system of requirements, incentives, claims, and evidence that we call the Provenomics® Engine. Buyers set requirements for sellers and sellers respond with claims against those requirements, supported by evidence. Buyers may offer optional incentives, in the form of rewards and/or penalties, to encourage ideal behaviors from sellers.
How does it work?
The central activity of every supply chain is people moving things through places. Sometimes things are transformed or combined to create new things. Raw materials can be tracked throughout each stage of the manufacturing process, even after they've been nested within a larger assembly.
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​Our network gathers and organizes data to create a digital representation of supply chain operations in the form of digital twins of people, places, and things. The interactions between those three elements are captured and stored on a permissioned distributed ledger to store immutable records that chronicle their stories.
People can be organizations, teams of people, or individuals within those teams. The digital twin of an organization might record its AS-9100 certification or other relevant claims. The digital twin of an individual records their interaction with things in places and holds relevant certifications pertinent for regulatory compliance. For example, who operated the tooling of a composite component using a 5-axis CNC machine and which credentials they hold.
​Places may be defined as any location you need to track. Places can nest inside each other, for example a manufacturing facility, a production line within that facility, or a specific piece of equipment on a specific line. Locations might also be a warehouse, a warehouse shelf, a truck, a pallet, a barrel, or a mine--whatever you need to track for your business needs. The digital twin of a place records all the events that occur in that place, including all the interactions between people and things that occurred there. It also records all relevant certifications, inspections, and audits related to that location.
Things might be raw materials, ingredients, piece parts, sub assemblies, or finished goods. The digital twin of a thing records all of its interactions with places and people, for example, who made it, inspected it, moved it, owned it, and consumed it (and all of their histories too), together with the physical journey it went on from the origin of its raw materials, all the way to the end consumer. Digital twins of things are also nested and recursive, so they include the lifecycle stories of every one of their sub-assemblies, piece parts, and ingredients, all the way back to raw materials, giving full end-to-end traceability and provenance.
​Companies choose the granularity of tracking that’s right for their business. All data is immutable, time stamped, and secure. Web services make it easy to integrate with your existing IT infrastructure such as ERP, WMS, OMS and other systems of record. Data is also collected from sensors, RFID readers, scanners, smartphones, and other real-time sources.
By recursively recording the interactions of people, places and things, we build a detailed, trusted provenance for every product, all the way back to raw materials. Because information is stored on a permissioned digital ledger we maintain data property ownership for all participants, which means all data remains the property of the entities who contributed it. Only people with permission to view data can see it, maintaining full privacy and data rights. All transparency data is cataloged and stored in the Transparency Cloud, a distributed data cloud of digital twins.
Data Containers and Digital Twins
Provenance
Our platform stores all digital twin data inside a universal data container which captures the interactions of people, places, and things. To assure interoperability and make it easy to support multi-tiered supply chains, the same data structure is used no matter which company or even which industry is being served.
The digital twins inside our universal data container record details about the people, places, and things they represent, a history of any activity or events that have occurred, and details of interactions with other digital twins. For example, the digital twin of a product records every interaction it has with every place and person it encounters during its life, allowing us to capture where it was made, how it was made, and who made it.
The universal data container also holds all the requirements, incentives, claims, or evidence that are needed to support the Provenomics® Engine, the capability that sits at the heart of our platform.
The Provenomics® Engine
Driving change can be hard. People need to hear clear expectations and sometimes receive an incentive to change their behavior. Bringing transparency to supply chains is no different.
At the heart of our platform is a system of requirements, incentives, claims, and evidence that we call the Provenomics® Engine. Here’s how it works.
VISIBILITY
PRODUCER/
MINER
BROKER
SUPPLIER
MANUFACTURER
DISTRIBUTOR
CUSTOMER
Throughout the supply chain, buyers interact with sellers. On our platform, buyers set transparency requirements for sellers. These requirements can relate to the supplier, to products, or even to a specific order.
For example, a buyer might require evidence that a seller uses age-appropriate labor, demand an origin for a product, or require proof of on-time delivery of an order.
TRANSPARENCY
BUYER
SELLER
Evidence
Claims
Incentives
Requirements
Sellers respond to each requirement with a claim that’s supported by the required level of evidence, such as a document, a photograph, an internal audit, sensor data, or an external certification.
The Provenomics® Engine matches requirements with claims and evidence and highlights any exceptions so they can be resolved.
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For sellers who need a little extra encouragement to gather and share transparency data, buyers can deploy our optional incentives capability, either offering premiums for compliance, or extracting penalties for non-compliance.
For example, a mission critical component gets flagged and corrected based on the ability to see an anomaly before launch is delayed.
This powerful system of requirements, incentives, claims, and multi-level evidence is unique to our platform, and allows you to drive ideal behaviors all the way up your supply chain giving you end-to-end visibility, traceability, and provenance.