 As I was saying earlier, I am Vice President of Global Learning Initiatives for the Center for Global Enterprise. We are at the halfway mark in our series of six expert connects on the digital supply chain. Today's session is the first of two we will do on digital supply chain technology enablers. The first is the increasingly popular topic of blockchain. Next week on June 26 at the same time we'll look at another technology enabler artificial intelligence and machine learning and its application with supply chain. Before we start this week's expert connect a few housekeeping notes. This session and all the sessions in this series will be recorded and posted on CGE's YouTube channel. At the end of the presentation we will have a slide with the upcoming schedule for additional expert connects as well as a link to the digital supply chain institute website for more information. We will leave approximately 20 minutes at the end of this session for audience questions. We'll also take them throughout if we have time. If you have a question for our presenters you will see a button at the bottom of your screen a feature that says Q&A. Please submit your questions using the Q&A feature. We'll try to get to all the questions time permitting. As I mentioned today's expert connect is about blockchain. The technology to hear some describe it is the next big game changer for businesses. But hype aside technology or using any technology in a strategic way is a significant undertaking for a business. In this week's session we will explore the business and technical case for blockchain technology, its application in the digital supply chain and the results of a recent pilot project. We're fortunate to have two presenters today with true blockchain credentials. Our presenter Sean Luma is the technology research leader for CGE's digital supply chain institute where he has been leading our blockchain work. Joining Sean as co-presenter is Jitendra Tethi, assistant vice president leading blockchain for Arescent a global design engineering firm that has recently completed a blockchain pilot project. Jitendra will share the quantifiable results of their recent blockchain pilot. Now I said quantifiable because in all the excitement over blockchain quantifiable results of applying this technology have been scarce until now. And with that I'll turn it over to Sean and Jitendra. Thank you. Okay thank you Ira. Next slide please. Great as we get started here for those of you who may have thought that you're going to learn how to trade cryptocurrency this morning that that is not part of this session. We're going to talk about blockchain which is the underlying technology of course to cryptocurrencies but we're going to talk about blockchain in a manner that as it applies to business applications and specifically to digital supply chains. So we'll give you an introduction on blockchain. We'll talk about its use as a automation and transformation tool. We'll show you a little market research from our recently completed survey and then Jitendra who we're fortunate to have with us today. We'll talk about a pilot that Arescent has has run in its applications to its its clients and from that we'll move into a little bit about lessons learned how you get started and then talk about future considerations. For those of you who tuned into the first couple sessions George Bailey talked a little bit about new data models and how they require new management tools to manage the data that's available and makes sense out of it and of course as you consume that data and organize it in a manner that you can make business decisions then you change your workflow and there's impact to the way that you do your business and manage your supply chain. So we're going to talk about blockchain as a workflow modeling tool today. Next slide please. First what is blockchain? Blockchain is far more than the technology that powers the crypto market. It really is a cross enterprise transformational tool that we'll talk more about as the session continues. But it allows you to have a distributed database that's decentralized meaning that as you leave your enterprise it can be part of the workflow to your suppliers and also your customers. So it can create an end workflow for you in a decentralized manner. As the data is written to the blockchain and one of the big questions is what data do you put on the chain and what data do you keep off the chain? But whatever is written to the chain is immutable, it cannot be changed. We'll talk a little bit later on about how that can be challenging as you deal with regulations around personal data. But what's there on the blockchain is there forever. It's distributed and if it's a public blockchain you're not quite sure where it may reside over time. And of course the data that's on the blockchain is encrypted, it's hashed, it's typically a very secure 256-bit key that you're dealing with so it's very difficult to penetrate. Next slide please. So how does the blockchain work? Well each member maintains its own ledger. A way to look at it is as a distributed ledger technology and that copies can can reside across the network. You can have a number of nodes. Those nodes are are maintained through a consensus algorithm. There's a number of different blockchain technology providers out there. Most of them have a unique algorithm for gaining consensus among the nodes in the network. But as each as data is added to to the chain a new block is created and there's forward and backward pointers created that link that block and are also part of the the integrity of the chain and the security of the chain. We mentioned that the entries are permanent. They're transparent. Anybody who participates in the network can see them. You can search on them and you can view the transaction history. So one of the things you're seeing that that blockchain as a blockchain use case today is the concept of digital twins. As you create a physical asset, you may create a digital asset and then you maintain a transaction log against that digital asset. As it moves through your supply chain, as it moves through your manufacturing process, as it as it moves through its life cycle. So you have the the entire life cycle of of a particular asset, particularly good in, for example, in the in the aircraft or the aircraft engine business, where engines are moved from plane to plane parts are put in in various locations around the world. So you can track the the history in in repair history of the engine. And you can also track the history of the parts and where they came from and down to the technician who put them in through the transaction history. It's linked to a to a digital asset. All members in the network have copies distributed ledger technology. If you participate in the network, you have access to the data. And you have a you have a copy of the ledger. And as as we talked previously, the the blocks are are approved by everyone in the network before they're before they're linked. The block information, it could it could be anything. I can represent transactions, contracts. There are some some nonprofits out there they're doing research accord project is one of them on on how you put actual physical contracts onto the blockchain and manage it through a through a blockchain workflow. You can put assets identities really anything that can be described in a digital form which is virtually anything can be can be put on a blockchain and maintain that way. All the data is encrypted. It's it's hashed. You have a private key. You have a public key. The combination of those two get hashed together to ensure the the integrity of the block that that you're adding to the network. Next slide please. So how do you think about blockchain? And in our view here at the Institute is is you want to think about blockchain as you're looking at at potential use cases in terms of the value you will receive from from automating that use case and putting it on the blockchain. Don't think of it in terms of proof of concept that'll probably that'll get you a set of results but it won't really show you the value that is inherent in the in the use case that that you're looking at. So always think in terms of proof of value. That's one thing that we have learned as as we've gone through the pilots that that we've done here at the Institute in conjunction with our members in in technology providers. It is the ender blockchain is the underlying technology that powers bitcoin but it's but bitcoin is just one use case. The technology has has inherent power in game changing power as a distributed technology that helps any whether manufacturing is as we're talking about today. And think about it as a transformational tool because it is a transformational tool allows you to transform beyond your enterprise boundaries. And that's and that's very powerful in a distributed fashion and a trusted fashion. It is an automation tool. It's one of many automation tools out there. You need to look at blockchain as as part of your automation tool set and make sure that you're selecting the right use cases to to apply blockchain to. And here at the Institute at the Digital Supply Chain Institute we have we have developed what we call the blockchain return index which is a which is a tool that assists you in evaluating potential use cases and assessing the value that that you could potentially achieve by by implementing that use case. Next slide please. So we talked about blockchain what it is a little bit about the technology. We'll get into more detail with with Jitendra in a few minutes on on the the depth of the technology and in how to apply it. But let's talk about what makes a good blockchain blockchain use case. It's good for cross enterprise transformation where a single ledger is impractical or not trusted by the members in the network. It's good when intermediaries provide limited value or add complexity. I think one of the great examples is the is the shipping industry and logistics where there are freight forwarders or custom agents. There's lots of intermediaries that that provide relatively limited value and add a lot of a lot of overhead to the process. It's good where transactions are are entered by multiple parties and those parties have to interact. Again if you if you look at the shipping industry you've got the you got the freight carrier you've got you've got customs you got the shipper you've got the recipient they're all looking at the same data they're potentially want to update portions of information within a shipping record. So there's a lot of interaction that that goes back and forth today that all those two intermediaries imagine the efficiency that in improvements you can make if you could eliminate the the intermediaries in a trusted manner. Blockchain allows you to do that. And then you can on top of blockchain you can you can put a smart contract layer view that as a process layer. It doesn't have to be a contract and traditional sense of the word. It's it's more a workflow. So you put smart workflows that that trigger in Jatinger will talk about how they did this at at Aeroscent in the in the payback they got. But you've got a contract layer that that manages the workflow as as something you know such as a product moving through your manufacturing process or your supply chain process is put together you can you can check on it you can have trigger points that they get updated where the information's forward and passed on to to other members in the network. Next slide please. Okay some uses for for blockchain some supply case supply chain use cases that I think are our powerful examples. We talked a little bit about about shipping. There's a company out of the UK called Marine Transport International that I think is is probably the the leader or one of the industry leaders right now in in automating shipping logistics. They've done some pilots with Rotterdam in the port of Hall in the UK. They have been adopted by the by the UK as the the model for for automating shipping. They've got consensus within the House of Commons right now and of course as as the UK as as you go through brexit then you've got a case where the UK needs now to have trade contracts with each member of the European Union and so they're developing models to do that. You'll also see that virtually anyone who has a blockchain has identified this as a use case so IBM and MERSC for example have a joint venture. SAP is is is trying to do a a platform and attract members to it. This to me is a very powerful use case for for blockchain. Track and Trace is another one. You've probably seen IBM's commercials on on farm to to table tracking of fruit especially valuable when when when you have a bad product that that may enter the food chain and you can identify where the product was distributed and from what farm it came from. Over time I think healthcare personal healthcare your personal healthcare records are are are going to be a another powerful use case that will be adopted by the healthcare industry that will give you control over your health data it'll give you control over who sees it and what they see and allow you to interact with your with your medical providers and and pharmacists in the future and then of course we have Aeroscent. Aeroscent has has looked at at the software development supply chain put in place a a blockchain enabled process that goes across development platforms and Jatendra will give us some more detail on that but there's lots of use cases out there. There's also lots of hype there are lots of bad use cases that are being being implemented and I want to say bad use cases it's use cases where blockchain may not be the the best tool for the job so you got to choose carefully you got to look at some of the criteria that that we gave you earlier to help you with your evaluation and ensure that that blockchain is the right tool it's a complex tool it's complex to form networks it's complex to to implement it's complex to to send people to to use and of course it comes with you know especially in a public blockchain it comes with a lot of overhead trying to trying to track blocks that are added and gain consensus throughout the network that the block is valid okay next slide please however huge investments being made in in blockchain today tremendous investments lots of lots of hype very few results to to date that you can really point to as as game changers but they're coming they're they're around the corner so in in 2017 we we saw almost a billion dollars in in in venture funding for blockchain this year IDC is estimating that there'll be a 2.1 million in investment and we saw about 300 million in just the first quarter this year about a third of that investments in the US we're also seeing a lot of investment a lot of companies in in central and eastern Europe there are blockchain skilled and have a have a good set of skills and you know making making good progress in the market so I think you know last year there was a lot of hype there were a few pilots very few things if any in production this year you're seeing more structured pilots more value coming out of those more companies popping up with skills more applications that run on top of the blockchain and and I think the market is starting to coalesce and of course it will sort out over time and consolidate over time but I think we're right on the cusp of of things seeing some major major changes to workflows in automation as a result of blockchain if you look at it and you go through the criteria and say say what other tool is out there that's distributed immutable enables cross enterprise automation there really isn't there really isn't anything else out there today that fits that criteria distributed databases are not the same as a as a distributed ledger and in blockchain capabilities okay next slide please so blockchain blockchain everywhere you can't you can't pick up any publication any newspaper any magazine within in that c black chain being mentioned there however when you when you get underneath it there aren't many results proof of concepts ideas we talked about IBM and MERSC we talked about what is SAP is doing in the shipping and logistics areas but everything is everything is just at the beginning right now it's in the idea stage some pilots being run but you know when is this stuff going to all come together and I mentioned at the beginning that here at the institute we we conduct a survey every year we had half a dozen questions this year in our survey got 112 responses I believe to those questions about how corporations enterprises are on their implementation and pilots next slide please so looking at some of the results of our surveys as it applies to supply chains the first question we asked was will blockchain technology transform your supply chain everybody agrees you know virtually 58 percent agree 13 percent strongly agree there's another 34 percent sitting in the neutral camp but you know for where we are today and for an emerging technology to have close to 60 percent of the respondents say this is a game changer tells you that that blockchain is on the on the forefront of people's minds and they and they recognize that it's something that they need to go investigate in in deal with next slide please next question how will your supply chain benefit from blockchain and I think towards the right hand side there you could probably guess you probably would have had the same sort of answers on where blockchain adds value to the supply chain specifically in logistics we're back to that logistics use case we keep talking about supplier visibility what's your supplier doing do they have the the fabric on hand to to produce the the finished goods that you need we're we're writing a pilot right now with a with a aerospace company who wants to know for example where the where where their supplier is in manufacturing tail sections of of their aircraft and of course their their suppliers subcontract components so they want to look at tier beyond just just tier one but tier two tier three and tier four suppliers to get a better visibility into into potential delays or or issues with with supply forecast and planning blockchain if you run it and we ran a pilot with a consumer goods manufacturer that goes from their customer all the way through their supply chain so you have complete visibility from in forecasting capability for what the what the customer might order through all the way down through your supply chain as to which which of your your factories might have might have capacity might have the rate materials on on hand and can can deliver quicker and enables you to identify potential delays in in fulfilling the order for your for your customer at an early point counterfeit goods is is is one procurement is is another good use case of course payments triggered by smart contracts as you go through the as as you go through the process making sure that your subcontractors have sufficient working capital is are getting getting their payments as as quick as possible regulatory requirements that is you know to me meeting regulatory requirements is is almost a use case unto itself but certainly everybody all enterprises face regulatory requirements of various kinds whether that be the labor that produces the product or meeting carbon emissions standards there are and the blockchain enables you to assure that properly applied that that you're meeting regulatory requirements across a a broad spectrum in in many many many countries next slide please so getting down to the individual companies you know how are you how is your company thinking about supply chain you'll see from this slide that only four percent say that they're at the implementation stage and probably if you went and looked at that four percent they're relatively small self-contained within one business unit or maybe between a couple business units sort of implementation 31 percent say they're reading about it 26 percent say hey we're we're watching to see how how the technology market evolves uh another 22 2 percent says well we've we've at least set up a a small team to go look at it so uh so so yeah so yeah those numbers together and you you see that three quarters of uh other respondents are are not at a uh at a point in time where they're actually applying the technology so this gets back to lots of lots of talk lots of hype but few results to date okay next slide well when do people uh who responded to our survey think that that blockchain is going to become of age uh you'll see the majority of people think it's still three to five years out before it's a true uh production ready technology that uh that'll have significant impact on their business and their business models now one of the reasons is uh it is not the technology itself but it's the complexity of uh managing a uh a distributed uh uh network the governance that's required to manage that network the uh the data governance of knowing where your data resides and uh and who has access to it so there's a number of things that need uh need to be worked out I think before I think before uh before blockchain is is wildly adopted but uh everyone is uh it's it's there everyone's investigating it uh it's uh it's coming it's it's probably not primetime ready yet next slide so let me uh let me turn it over to uh Jatindra now who'll talk about what they what they did at Aeroscent the results they've got uh a point point here as we get started is that that as you look at uh in read about blockchain you'll see examples but you won't see the proof of value you'll see proof of concepts but uh it's hard to identify what the what the actual return numbers are behind that uh Aeroscent has done something different here uh in that they uh in that they approach it from the proof of value standpoint so let me turn it over to Jatindra to uh to walk you through what what Aeroscent has done Jatindra thank you Sean I hope you can hear me okay I can hear you fine okay uh so uh what we really kind of uh were looking for is uh is to attack a problem statement of improving the overall life cycle and productivity of how software product development happens because that's really kind of the core of what Aeroscent does in terms of uh providing engineering services and design services to our customer and uh when we looked at how typically a product is developed and uh you want to drive more agility and uh productivity uh to reduce the time to market uh for taking out that product you really can break it down into uh various phases of development pretty much every organization would delegate that work to different teams possibly possibly different organizations and contractors but truly the intent is to drive the productivity at a overall execution level uh while uh the part of the answer is really an adoption of DevOps and automation to improve the productivity uh unfortunately at an aggregate level the results don't show up because uh what you are really doing at at a overall product level uh productivity is to make sure that the dependencies which we have on different teams different stakeholders is met uh contractually and uh the quality at which the deliveries are done is flawless so the idea was how do we improve the cycle time how do we improve the productivity and how do we improve the quality so we uh we did a proof of concept with the intersection of DevOps and and beads and uh we deployed it internally in a couple of projects which uh we deliver for customers and uh we collected the matrices of how the productivity happens the cycle time happens before and after and the results were pretty pretty interesting and and and uh encouraging uh I would encourage you to uh read the overall white paper which is published on the DSCI website which kind of gives you more detail in terms of what matrices we went after but the fact that uh we were tracking various KPIs and monitoring them in the general visibility of what's happening in the overall development lifecycle really kind of led to improvement in productivity and quality next slide please okay so what what did we kind of build our solution we call it beads which is blockchain-enabled DevOps solution is really a kind of a overlay layer on top of all the DevOps tools and investments which are done in a particular organization with the intent to really find out what's really happening in the workflow underneath those tools uh typically you would use tools for doing your source code management your requirement analysis your builds your release pipelines uh but what is really important to understand is uh at what frequency you are doing deployments what are the bottleneck processes between a handoff which happens from a development team to a testing team to an operation team and can that slack be kind of removed from the overall workflow so that's that's the first part which is building building a layer which connects to various DevOps tools in in in an organization and get the key events from such tools the second is really about building KPIs on top of those events and enforcing them using policies which are modeled as smart contracts in a blockchain world what are these KPIs the KPIs are at at no point in time your code coverage should fall below 80 percent at no matter what you would do a nightly build no matter what you would do a weekly release these are enforceable policies which we understand very well in plain English and we want to enforce on top of the software development activities which were happening the tool really kind of allows you to model them deploy them as smart contracts on blockchain and make sure that these smart contracts are fulfilled at all points in time and if they are not then there is a way by which someone has to someone gets notified and has to take a action to to take care of that the the other reason why a blockchain is super super important and a key ingredient to the solution is the fact that product development has decentralized I mean look at your mobile phone and and look at the amount of components which go into it the amount of software that goes into it it is sourced from multiple organizations and and brought together to form product when things happen in a multi organization setup as part of the product development or software development you you have dependencies in terms of getting a particular piece of software with a required quality at a given time and being able to enforce a certain set of quality rules which every organization needs to follow blockchain enables you to realize this in a multi organization setup and enforce these rules which are agreed by all and are therefore providing a level of confidence and bring trust into the system so so that's really kind of I mean how we kind of conceptualize the solution and we we we implemented that so that's your next slide please I just wanted to cover a few key highlights about the solution and and the capabilities and value it kind of brings back first of all is the workflows and so that's if you can just toggle through some animation I think there is one yeah yeah one one back thank you so the first one is really around workflows so any software development or product development there is an inherent workflow which goes behind the scenes and the idea is to really understand that workflow and identify the steps which are sort of slack inside the steps in the workflow in effect what you're really trying to understand is what are the what are the elements of waste and which which can be eliminated just to kind of give examples the fact that the the the build was ready and the software team the testing team took two days for them to start the testing is a good visibility to make sure that that delay doesn't happen and once you are able to identify and crunch that you are improving the overall productivity by elimination of such slack and waste into the interview workflow so that's what basically we get the beads will listen to the various events which happen from various DevOps tools and you may be using a Jira or a Jenkins or a GitLab or Chef for deployment but it will tie it together into a workflow and model how much time is kind of wasted between handoff from different teams and different tools so that's the next slide please second aspect is matrices matrices are essentially the interpretation and aggregation of events which are collected from various DevOps tools examples of those are how much lines of codes are committed by a developer in a day to how much of builds happen and how much is the success rate of those builds are some of the examples of matrices which you want to enforce all these matrices eventually become a way by which you are enforcing policies on top of it so examples like enforcing that code coverage is on a particular level at all times becomes a kind of smartphone track which sits on top of the matrices so that's your next slide please traceability is everything which is written and read from various tools which are involved in the software development lifecycle is written into blockchain so you would be able to verify whether that transaction happened and who did that so in case of in case of identifying any issues which may come up later like identifying who was the person who actually approved the use of a particular open source software and who was the corresponding vulnerability testing team who approved the use of a particular version of open source open source software are the events which are written into blockchain and because it is immutable and you can trace it back to where it originated from you have a complete lineage of what what really happened in the in the overall execution of the lifecycle which is beneficial from two perspectives one to understand how things happen second to really enforce the the that the deliveries happen with a particular quality and and timeline objective in mind so that's your next slide please finally is the visibility given a multi organization multi vendor like kind of a scenario you would have a situation wherein say a vendor one or a team one would basically use their own set of tools for development and would not really like to share and give the complete access to the other teams in terms of what they are doing but the idea here is not really to get a visibility at each and every event which is happening or every transaction that is happening what you are really really interested in is knowing things are fine at an aggregate level and and enforce certain constraints on top of it so the idea is that teams and vendors can continue to use the tools which they are currently using it's not a replacement for any DevOps tools which they are currently using but beads will sit as a layer on top of it to understand the events which happen on those tools and collect them into blockchain such that the minimalistic information which is required to enforce the quality and the smart contracts on top of it can be enforced on blockchain next slide please. This is how it would typically look like in terms of deployment multiple organizations multiple tools the the red dot is sort of a beads node essentially a blockchain node which sits into that organization and is responsible for collecting events from various tools that are used within that organization and bring it into a network which is really central and visible to every stakeholder involved the platform takes the ownership of putting smartphone tracks on top of it such that any deviation from the KPIs which are agreed and enforced are bubbled up and are visible again to all the stakeholders so so that's really kind of how a typical deployment would kind of work in a multi organization multi team kind of a setup yeah so hope that gives you a kind of peek into kind of what we did and like I said we kind of piloted this solution for two projects and we came up with a significant improvement in the productivity and the quality of the software developed. When it comes to technology choices while there are many examples of what can be what what can be used it really is not really about technology it is really about focusing on your use case and seeing how you can relook at the existing process and derive value from bringing visibility to all stakeholders from it that's really kind of the central part of it. When it comes to platforms all these platforms which are listed down are pretty much popular and have their own merits in terms of the throughputs and scalability and the ease of use so choose probably depending on whether you want to do a public or a private and second would be the programming language which you and your teams are comfortable with but like I said it's the choice of technology should be secondary to the use case you can realize the same use case within technology. In our case the BEATS is basically built on top of Exxonium which is private blockchain implementation built using Rust and Java and allows us to basically have a private network of nodes in which we can we can share information within that network. So yeah so that's it next slide please. Okay great so Sean maybe a good time I hand it over back to you. Okay what we pause here and maybe take a couple questions Jatendra. One of the things I'd like to point out before we before we start taking questions though is it's important and it's important with any technology to ensure that you adapt your workflow to the technology so for those of us who were around in the beginning of the ERP days you know for example people were running their workflows on on on spreadsheets SAP came along or Oracle or whatever ERP system I'm going to talk about and in a lot of people and I was in Asia at the time I took their spreadsheet process and and stuck it on SAP using none of the none of the benefits on the capabilities of SAP and of course about a week after doing that their employees were back to using their spreadsheets because they were more efficient for managing managing the the process and and they weren't taking advantage of the inherent capability in SAP so you need to do the same thing here with blockchain is look at your cross enterprise workflow and make sure that you adapt your workflow to the tool and and not and not the other way around. So Ira do we have questions here that we can we can answer at this point or you know please please folks if you have questions now is a good time to uh to ask them. Well I know there was one question do we explain what BEAD stands for? Yeah BEADS is a BEADS is an acronym for blockchain enabled DevOps solution while while that it is an acronym for for what I said it turns out that the architecture also looks like BEADS the way I described in the in the previous slide because you have these BEADS nodes which are deployed at each of the organization and together they're kind of tying together so yeah it's it's an acronym as well as I mean the way the architecture looks it's a it's a solution which Addison has developed at an intersection of blockchain and DevOps. Okay thank you. If you have questions for uh to Tendra or or Sean please submit them through the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen we have some questions but I'm going to ask one Tendra uh one of the um slides that Sean showed the results of a I guess one of our surveys indicated that most users felt that blockchain is three to five years out from becoming common place or widely used within their organization. I was wondering if you agree with that assessment and also what do you think will accelerate that acceptance or what do you think can hinder that acceptance? Yeah yeah I think the technology of blockchain has been there for for a while uh so it's not like I mean it's it's the new technology on the block and and stuff so I think the adoption of blockchain will really become very use case specific and I think Sean Sean did kind of talk about some of the use cases which are kind of visible out there but essentially the use cases which is really kind of adding value in a multi-organization multi-party kind of setup would be the kind of leading in use cases of how the adoption will kind of start. I think I kind of also agree with the with the assessment that for it to really become mainstream probably it is kind of three years out and I think the reasons are really more to do with the with the alignment of the regulatory bodies the standards bodies and ecosystems coming together to really kind of make this happen. So I think ecosystems play a major role in really kind of adoption of a solution so if you really look at say I mean another of the solution which we are working on is really around on telcos and how the health of cellular networks are kind of shared across various operators in in a region really that involves every operator to come together and agree to participate in a set of nodes and network which they see a value on. So the way it will really happen is probably using your standards or or consortiums kind of getting formed to really propel and make it mainstream for it to happen. So in a way long answer but I kind of agree to the survey that one to two years probably the use cases where it is obvious and three to five when everything comes together and and then it becomes mainstream but for sure it will happen. Thank you. All right I have a question from Gregory Millen. Presently what are the major forces that are coming into play that is driving blockchain deployment forward? For example do you think the recent EU GDPR rollout will have major impact? Yes I'll take that one. Thanks Gregory. The the questions kind of have you have two questions here and they have answers at the the opposite end of the spectrum. What's driving blockchain deployment is the ability to to automate workflows and transform your business processes to create a a logical enterprise if you will right so so you can link link all your suppliers to your customers potentially you can share data you can know exactly where you are in the process you can trigger you can trigger payments automatically it's it enables transparency and it enables the information to be trusted by the by the parties in that in that in that workflow. Now you also ask about GDPR which is the general data protection requirements writes that that the EU just ruled out. That is on the surface diametrically opposed to blockchain because blockchain data is mutable can't be changed whereas GDPR requires you to to be able to delete data if a individual says I I no longer want that that data to be to be available. I'm in the process as part of the research we're doing here at the Institute of of authoring a paper on that with in conjunction with a couple of very premier law firms one in the UK and one here in the US where we are taking a look at that and and trying to figure out how you adapt the GDPR regulations to to to blockchain. So give us give us some time to figure that out probably probably won't be too long but there's there's going to be impact on on blockchain and this is this is one of the things actually that will inhibit or slow up deployment in the future is complying with with local regulations and ensuring that you're complying with with local regulations. Gregory you'll probably probably be a be a couple months I probably another six weeks before it's available. Can I can I just add to what Sean said? Yes. Okay so yeah I think Sean you summarized it well the only thing which I would add is there would be new architecture patterns and approaches of how people would look at kind of doing these so so so yes I mean everything in blockchain is written and immutable is is correct but the patterns of I mean what remains on the chain and what goes off the chain can really kind of become the ways in which you kind of overcome such kind of restrictions so what you are storing on the chain is really just a hash or a pointer to what the actual asset or data is so so the what really goes on the chain and what really goes off the chain becomes an important consideration as you kind of look for realizing the solution in light of UDPR. Great thank you. All right Oluska again Sanjulo asks when you hear blockchain what comes to mind is use in a cryptocurrency which is I think what Sean had mentioned at the beginning and he wants to know about other use cases where blockchain can be used and obviously we've been discussing those in this session but I'm wondering just to extend on this is supply chain the killer app for blockchain is there one killer app? Yeah Chatery why don't I try and answer that first and then you can you can add to it. I think that that most people that are dealing with blockchain, blockchain pilots at this point would say that supply chain is the is the app or the process that will benefit most from blockchain because that's really the intersection of most corporations with outside corporations and this enables you to get visibility across your supply chain across your customers potentially out to your customers customers in understanding what demand is out there and understanding the ability of your suppliers to meet that demand and in what time frame. So as as I go around and talk to experts in this area both supply chain and technology and in universities such as MIT or Stanford or Berkeley or Frankfurt they will all say that they see supply chain benefiting most from from blockchain in the future. Jatendra comments to add to that. Yes yeah I agree I mean yes that's the most sorted out kind of use case but I don't think there is the only killer use case. I think the killer use cases are really from a perspective of when you look at say information registry. We are seeing kind of governments looking at land records digitizing the education degrees and certificates sort of making a information registry which is kind of immutable and cannot be changed our kind of things which we see here. The other is really about information provenance which is really about tracking down the information to the source of where it originated. We have seen kind of examples of that tied to physical assets like I mean lineage of a diamond and where it originated and how it came to your finger but you really can kind of apply that to the information set as well as to how did it kind of come together which kind of would extend to documents files verification verifiability and stuff. If you also look at it DevOps I mean I would really it's a pretty interesting use case realization of how you can apply blockchain to a software development process is kind of a pretty unique intersection so I think there is a lot of use cases which we can really see and look at from a lens bit of trust between parties data provenance mutability of the content and applied to into our respective industries. We have certainly looked at certain industries where Addison focuses on including telecommunications and industrial and software and we've lined up a few use cases which are really focusing on these industries and if you really see probably it is orthogonal in a way to kind of where the majority of the use cases people are going after which is financial healthcare and stuff. So yes I think it's a matter of looking at the use cases with the lens of what characteristics you are looking to realize and what value you can derive to really come up with where it really can be relevant technology to build a solution on it. Thank you. All right we have I think time for one more question and I'll take it from Ayio Alatoyum who asks how effective is blockchain likely to be an engagement at B to C scenarios? Supply chain is mostly B to B where all parties are fairly well resourced. How about a business or how can a business use it to engage say a much dispersed and numerous stakeholders say customers through a mobile infrastructure? I know who wants to take that one. Yeah Chachendra you want to take that one? Yeah so there are yeah of course the B to B part is very clear that's a that's a clear intersection of I mean various parties being entrusted into common information and driving value from there but there are B to C use cases as well and kind of in the previous answer I kind of touched upon a few use cases like land registry or tracking a high value high net worth kind of item to where it originated and how it was manufactured these are these are kind of the questions which the end customer would be kind of interested in knowing though they won't really participate into the blockchain network as kind of bring a node into the network but they would really plug in into a kind of set of services which sit on top of another blockchain network so the the mode in which the participation of B to C will happen would be somewhat different compared to B to B but there are enough use cases where where the end customers are really interested in knowing the the sourcing of materials where it came from and how it was manufactured and who designed it and and and aspects like that and those would be very interesting use cases around blockchain. The other one really also would be it's kind of a between B to C and B to C B to B is like warranty I mean manufacturers are interested in knowing the end customer of who is using their product and and really tie that warranty chain it's it's really kind of going beyond kind of B to B and B to C kind of a thing where where it is really crossing boundaries so I'm sure there are there are there are certainly there are more use cases on the B to B side but there is there are enough use cases on the B to C side as well. Thank you. Thank you Jitendra. Sean I don't know if you wanted to add to that. Well if we could I'd like to cover a couple points on the summary slide. Sugathri if you could back up to that. There's a couple important things that that we didn't get time to cover in detail. The and let me leave you with this thought the the challenge of blockchain isn't so so much the the technology right the technology's there the technology works you need to you need to pick the workflow and manage your your automation and make sure you're setting the the right objectives for evaluating that as you look at at cross-enterprise workflows but what gets difficult is in managing the ecosystem because your your suppliers for example may not want you to know how much fabric they have on hand because that then you can determine their ability to deliver they may not want you to know how much capacity they have available because you may negotiate harder if you know that they're running at 25 capacity instead of 90 capacity. How you format open governance system is is not simple so you need to you need to figure out how you incent people to participate. You need to think about how you manage a open governance environment. You need to think about how you meet the regulatory requirements. We had a couple couple questions around that but but each country and you know some places you know states within countries have a different set of regulatory requirements protection of personal data where data can be stored. Many countries such as Malaysia don't allow personal financial information to be stored outside the country. An open blockchain you're not quite sure where the data is going to be be stored so that drives you to a private blockchain it it drives you to ensuring that all members that blockchain that that have access to personal data are inside a summer boundary. So you need to consider these things and to me that's what will slow up adoption. It's not going to be the technology that inhibits adoption. It's going to be managing the where the data resides who owns it how you comply with local regulations and and how you incent people to to participate within within your network your ecosystem that you're creating here. So focus on value focus on adopting your process to fit the fit the technology in and I think you'll be successful future. Back to you thank you all for participating. Great thank you Sean and Chandra we really appreciate your time and you saw the scale you see the schedule right now for the next topic and that will be on artificial intelligence and machine learning on June 26 at the same time and for more information about the Digital Supply Chain Institute here comes the online URL and you can find us there and please reach out if you want to know more or have questions about this presentation. As I mentioned at the beginning we will post this on CGE's YouTube channel. Thank you and have a good day.