Startup Citizens Reserve today announced the launch of its Suku platform for a distributed ledger blockchain-powered supply chain solution for enterprise designed to work with any industry.

Modern-day supply chains require a great deal of paperwork and employee attention to keep them running smoothly. Minor mistakes in reporting and recording information as raw materials and products move through supply can lead to big discrepancies further down the line, thus increasing costs and causing problems.

“The current supply chain environment is complex and difficult to navigate,” said Citizens Reserve Chief Executive Eric Piscini (pictured). “Almost all enterprises require a supply chain to some extent, but the technology supporting them remains expensive, inefficient and fragmented.

Blockchain technology uses a tamperproof peer-to-peer shared ledger that can be used to automate check-ins when an event happens anywhere along a supply chain. The technology can also be used to manage information about each action, change in status and activity. Thus the history of transactions affecting a single product, sub-products, process or location can be audited after the fact to track back through the supply chain to better understand where something may have gone wrong.

“With Suku, we’re planning to build the decentralized supply chain-as-a-service platform that can span across industries, enabling our trading partners to interact in a way that’s been all but impossible up until now,” Piscini said.

The Suku supply chain blockchain will allow industries radical transparency and granularity, enabling operations to “see” the location of goods in real time. This is important because it allows all parties to act proactively instead of reactively when an issue arises.

The platform also can run its own distributed applications, executed on the blockchain and hooked into events that occur on supply chains – such as triggering reports when certain goods are packaged together, transported, placed into processing or complete processing. This capability allows enterprise users to write business logic directly into the supply chain platform that can automate any number of processes that would otherwise flow out of manual tracking of paperwork from factory floors or transport fleets.

The Suku platform uses two global blockchains to enable its supply chain tracking capabilities, Ethereum and Quorum.

The global Ethereum Project blockchain, a system second only to the most popular Bitcoin blockchain, will be used handle payments across supply chains by providing an exchange currency called “Suku Token,” which can be used to settle debts on the chain. Quorum is a permissioned blockchain developed by JPMorgan Chase & Co., which means it is secured and managed, it will be used to facilitate transactions such as bids and offers, or any other transaction that requires confidentiality between partners.

Between these two blockchain systems, Suku will provide capabilities enabling developers to program smart contracts for internal supply logic applications as well as allow partners to make agreements and trades that occur automatically when supply chain events occur. As every transaction on the blockchain is also trustworthy and historically auditable, Citizens Reserve also believes the Suku platform will enable greater trust and reliability for supply chain operations amongst trading partners by providing greater awareness about the origin and destination of goods.

Blockchains adapt to supply chains extremely well and numerous industries have sought to test the technology over the years for uses from food safety to transport networks. As early as 2016, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and IBM Corp. used a blockchain to address food safety concerns with pork being produced in China. That effort expanded into a multinational supply chain platform with the Blockchain Food Safety Alliance, an automated blockchain network of food suppliers, transport companies and retailers designed to maintain the privacy of each company while jointly enabling faster reaction to safety issues.

Other industries to explore blockchains for supply chain needs include Open Mineral, an online metal exchange based in Switzerland; diamond mining company De Beers Group, designed to prevent the trafficking of “blood diamonds;” and IBM and A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, which together launched TradeLens, a blockchain platform for tracking worldwide shipments. Those examples merely scratch the surface of the blockchain revolution when it comes to supply chain solutions adapted to specific industries.

Importantly for Citizens Reserve, the Suku blockchain will be industry-agnostic, this means that it can work for farming, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, shipping and other industries.

“Recent contentious incidents such as the Chinese pharmaceutical scandals have showcased the need for one layer of connection for trading partners to communicate and transact,” Piscini said. “From hardware to energy, all industries utilizing a supply chain take risks working with untrusted partners. The true value of a decentralized ecosystem comes in its nature of being trustless and having no single point of failure.”

With its infrastructure and back-end designed to provide an at-a-glance understanding of the blockchain and a system that can be extended with distributed apps and business logic, the platform would provide oversight and management for numerous types of industry needs.

The company also said the platform’s built-in transparency and auditability could empower more socially responsible practices among trading partners by providing greater awareness about the origin of goods and the values of the organizations.

Photo: Deloitte US