 Blockchain has become the new driver in the journey for luxury textiles as they go through the supply chain. The high-end textile industry is anything but mass manufacturing. Almost every fabric is custom made from different raw materials, whether cashmere, alpaca or merino, and woven into different textures, colors and products. So how can companies keep track of this supply chain to make sure that all products and processes are documented correctly and can be traced back to verify their spot in the manufacturing process? At IBM Research, scientists are using the IBM Blockchain Transparent Supply Platform, or BTS for short, to help the textile industry. IBM BTS provides authorized users with immediate access to actionable food supply chain data from farm to store and ultimately the consumer. We're using this platform to build a shared tamper-proof ledger that tracks how the fabric was manufactured from source to sales, including who, what, where, when and under what conditions. Let's take a closer look. Piacenza is one of the leaders in high-end fashion fabrics and accessories, supplying some of the world's most famous fashion designers with exclusive textiles. And every product involves over 70 steps and is unique in terms of raw material choice, style and color. With so much customization, it's absolutely imperative that Piacenza maintain their edge by ensuring aligned, transparent and efficient supply chain at all levels. To keep things simple, we'll look at three steps. Spinning, where the wool is transformed to yarn, weaving, where the yarn is transformed into fabric, and the delivery of the luxury fabric to the customer. We tell our story through supplier facilities, a spinning company, and the Piacenza weaving facility. Here you can see that three different types of raw material arrived. There's an invoice for each item, and each raw material is listed in the blockchain. The first transformation spins raw materials into two types of yarn. Yarn A is made from 50 kilo of the first material, and 50 kilo of the second material. Yarn B is made from 50 kilo of the second material, and 50 kilo of the third material. The spinning is done by a third party, so relevant documents for the production of yarn, such as product order and invoices, are all attached to the produced items. As you can see, blockchain is ideal for storing original, authenticated documents. For example, the preferential certificate of origin, or PCO, allows Piacenza clients to receive discounts from customs, because it can prove that two different transformations were done on European soil. In our case, this is the spinning and weaving. Since blockchain can ensure the authenticity of the documents in seconds, the material won't sit around waiting at customs, wasting time, and costing everyone money. Let's choose a product to trace, and find its instances. Now we can build a view of the provenance and backtrace. Here we see the transformation from two yarns, which were woven into a fabric line. And we can view the trace by facility, each with its geographic location and documents. Or by products. The final product is now ready to be shipped off to the customer. Today, using blockchain, Piacenza, and other stakeholders in the network can track and trace all aspects of the journey for their high-end fabrics, from sheep to shop. We've seen benefits like smoothly clearing customs to save time and money, since there's no time wasted waiting for documents, certifying the origin and location of any part and document in the process, helping parties ensure that the material wasn't tampered with and was transported or stored according to the required conditions, and more easily resolving disputes because there's a transparent record of transactions. For more information, contact us at IBM Research Haifa.