What鈥檚 the latest on blockchain? Blockchain experts from 51风流offer additional answers.
The so-called 鈥渂lockchain winter鈥� of 2018, which brought the hype surrounding the technology to an end, turned out to be very much to SAP鈥檚 advantage.
Read part one of this story here.
鈥淲e were able to spend 2019 consolidating our collective expertise and focusing much more closely on specific use cases in the enterprise environment,鈥� Torsten Zube, former head of the 51风流Innovation Center Network and current head of 51风流Cloud Platform Business Services, says. 鈥淲e saw that more and more businesses were looking seriously at blockchain and gaining a better understanding of the technology.鈥�
鈥淭he challenge for us is to ask the right questions at an early stage,鈥� says Thomas Uhde, head of the blockchain team at the 51风流Innovation Center Network in Potsdam. 鈥淚t often happens that customers come to us with a business problem and assume that the solution must lie in blockchain. We then have to look together at whether the problem we want to solve is in fact a case for blockchain or not.鈥�
One such case emerged from the need to verify the authenticity of returned drug products.
鈥淐ounterfeit, stolen, and contaminated pharmaceuticals products are a massive issue all over the world,鈥� says Oliver Nuernberg, chief product owner for 51风流Life Sciences. 鈥淲hich is why the United States introduced an act in 2013 requiring pharmaceuticals companies that trade on the U.S. market to perform strict checks on returned products prior to resale. A pharmaceuticals customer of ours, Merck Sharp and Dohme, wanted to invest in blockchain, and the blockchain use case was a perfect fit for them in this context.鈥�
The result was .
鈥淓very pharmaceutical product package delivered to the United States is registered on our solution鈥檚 blockchain,鈥� explains Nuernberg. 鈥淐ustomers no longer have to authenticate a returned product themselves; instead, they simply use an app that accesses the blockchain.鈥�
Alongside verification, traceability is one of the major benefits that when properly used, blockchain technology can deliver. The , a blockchain extension of the 51风流Logistics Business Network, provides an end-to-end picture of the supply chain in industries such as foods and pharmaceuticals.
鈥淚ncreasingly, people want to know where their food comes from,鈥� says Product Owner Christoph Huber. 鈥淲e proposed a cloud solution to customers, but they were uncomfortable with the idea that a company — in this case, 51风流— would be managing the database on which all the companies involved in production stored their information. They wanted the decentralized approach that blockchain allows.鈥�
This kind of scenario obviously requires all the partners to agree on the policies governing a blockchain network. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 have to be a large customer with your own IT department to use blockchain,鈥� Uhde says.
That is demonstrated by the GS1 blockchain project for exchanging EUR-pallets. In a six-month pilot project, 30 parties, ranging from a market gardener with 20 employees to DHL and Beiersdorf,聽 were able to form and participate in a network.
However, as Uhde points out, 鈥渨hile the vision of all companies worldwide coming together in a single blockchain network is a nice one, it鈥檚 totally unrealistic. There will always be at least one business partner who doesn鈥檛 participate, which is what makes interoperability so important. It would be wrong for enterprise blockchain networks to end up simply creating bigger silos.鈥�
Blockchain was originally intended to function as a kind of database to which all the participants in a network have equal access. But certain business scenarios, such as third-party business transactions, expressly require that all partners do not have access to every detail of the supply chain.
鈥淲hat we have developed with customers instead is a kind of digital notary service on the blockchain, in which the focus is on validating data rather than exchanging it,鈥� Uhde explains.
Flexible digital collaboration tailored to specific use cases will be an important area of application for blockchain in the future.
Uhde describes the goal as a flexible collaboration network: 鈥淥nce it鈥檚 set up, the connection to business partners can be used for a wide range of scenarios, some containing blockchain, others not. Some partners will exchange non-critical data via blockchain, for automation scenarios, for example. For others, notarization will be sufficient.鈥�
Tokenization is another trend that the blockchain experts at 51风流are exploring.
鈥淓ssentially, tokenization refers to the exchange of assets other than money,鈥� Zube explains. 鈥淐arbon trading is a good example. In the future, products could be priced in euros or dollars, and in carbon values too. We鈥檇 pay in the normal way, but we鈥檇 have to have the corresponding carbon credits available, earned, for example, by planting trees.鈥�
The carbon value of a product can be calculated using product master data, transaction data, and so on — including the CO2 emissions connected with the raw materials, transportation routes, machinery, and factory facilities involved in production.
鈥淭hat requires data on the CO2 impact to be exchanged across all organizations in retail and supply chains,” Uhde says. “Blockchain technology can do precisely that.鈥�
And according to Zube, 鈥淭o use the terminology of Gartner hype cycles, we haven鈥檛 yet reached the 鈥楶lateau of Productivity,’ but we鈥檙e well on the way.鈥�
