Recently Oracle has joined the Hyperledger consortium to offer its own Blockchain cloud service. In next few days (Oracle Open World; October, 2017) Oracle will bring to fore the next big offering from its stable - Oracle Blockchain Cloud Services (BCS). Hyperledger fabric enabled Oracle Blockchain service on the cloud will help customers build new blockchain-based applications and help existing Oracle customers to extended their SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and EBS applications. Infosys being a Cloud Elite partner of Oracle Cloud services is delighted to offer the first completely integrated SCM cloud-blockchain solution solving some of the most complex and challenging supply chain puzzles.
My earlier white paper published on infosys.com discussed at length the challenges being faced in the blockchain today. It ranged from the integration challenge between blockchain with ERP, interoperability between established enterprise platforms (ERP systems) and blockchains, and security and compliance for enterprises to interact and share solutions and transactions. Oracle Blockchain cloud services is like a breadth of fresh air to these known issues.
Infosys Oracle Supply Chain competency team along with Blockchain competency at Infosys researched and identified some key supply chain transparency issues plaguing their existing CPG and Industrial customers and developed a use case to solve this problem using blockchain. Infosys used the Oracle SCM cloud, PaaS applications and Oracle Blockchain Cloud Services and developed a Product Provenance solution and also leveraged Smart contracts for improving supply chain compliance. The solution use case has 3 main entities Customer, Distributor and Manufacturer all connected to the centralized Oracle Blockchain Cloud Services network.
The use cases traces the origin of the product from the manufacturer to Distributor to Customer and also tracks the change of ownership using the Oracle Blockchain features and Oracle SCM cloud and PaaS application architecture. This not only provides product provenance from cradle to grave for a produced lot but also complete supply chain transparency and availability visibility across supply chain echelons which was impossible without blockchain. The product provenance tracking using the Oracle BCS will help reduce counterfeit in the product in the supply chain as well as help trace global availability.
The solution also uses Smart Contract (Chain Code) to validate the authenticity and compliance of the product for its Country of Origin as desired by its customer. PaaS applications is developed on Oracle SCM cloud architecture to provide User Interfaces to mock up Distributors and Manufacturers business systems to update the product details into Oracle Blockchain thus truly using the strength of Oracle technology; easy integration capabilities with SOA, APIs and availability everywhere promise of cloud. The product before being sent to customer is inspected on a PaaS application with reference to the Blockchain info using the smart contracts and on passing the inspection successful receiving and putaway is done. On failure of the smart contract compliance from Blockchain the receiving is rejected by customer in SCM cloud. The entire integration, validation is touch less and paperless and entirely based on Blockchain info which is immutable and publicly available (smart contracts). Oracle solution is simple to use and extend existing Cloud investments. It took less than a week for Infosys to build this solution using Oracle Blockchain Cloud Services.
The solution has already started garnering rave reviews and customer interests. Please do visit us at Infosys booth number #1602 to learn more about the solution, its details and how it can benefit your company achieve supply chain transparency using Oracle Blockchain Cloud Services.