Agro commodities change multiple hands in their supply chain. After being sold to local buying agents by farmers, they are aggregated into bins and sent to traders. At trader warehouses, they are graded based on quality and processed, after which they are again split or merged into lots. Logistics companies also come into play to prepare shipment related documentation in order to transport the packaged shipments of these processed lots to manufacturers. Traders track the sales documents pertaining to these orders separately, while still spending additional efforts to validate them against actual fulfilment and delivery.
This complex supply chain ends up broken at multiple points as each stakeholder manages the movement of commodities and related documentation through their siloed systems. Thus it is difficult to get a verifiable and integrated view of this chain of custody across the ecosystem.
Apart from credibility of end-to-end journey of these agro commodities, additional overheads related to audits and certifications are required to ensure adherence to regulations and sustainability practices. Most of these audits are handled by third party certifying agencies in an offline manner, which leads to higher costs and lack of reliable information pertaining to provenance and processes being made available to downstream stakeholders of this value chain.
Key Challenges
- Reconciliation at various stages to gather trusted information on proof of origin, ownership and journey
- Lack of transparency in the ecosystem due to limited view around stakeholder transactions
- Integration of network node with existing application of client to avoid rip-and-replace of currently working business functions
- Absence of tamper-proof certification documents that could be shared in a more efficient manner to improve trust
Ready to experience?
TALK TO EXPERTS
The Solution
An integrated and trusted view of chain of custody from the farmer to the manufacturer
Based on multiple discussions with client, the stakeholders of the pilot network as well as the existing system to integrate this network with were identified. We also narrowed down the pilot scope to a single geography and relevant agro commodity based on business impact.
Infosys Supply Chain Distributed Application was leveraged to setup and configure the network for the client and identified stakeholders. This allowed us to accelerate development and contextualize the users for each of the nodes in lesser time, while still being able to customize our offering to the requirements provided by the client.
REST APIs exposed as base capability by our offering also allowed for quicker integration with the existing system of the client. This helped prove that blockchain can work in tandem with the current applications, allowing relevant data and transactions from them to flow seamlessly to the underlying network. IoT sensors were also integrated with the network nodes to establish automate data capture from the devices and allowing timely
Smart contracts deployed on respective nodes connected the physical goods movement with their digital trail, thus bringing down the reconciliation overheads at multiple stages and providing a connected yet granular view of the chain of custody from farmer to manufacturer.
Enhancing trust and transparency in agro supply chain through Blockchain
- Demonstrated information captured through existing system could be shared securely in near real-time with relevant stakeholders
- Integrated timeline view providing immutable transactions across five different stakeholders
- Provided a drill down feature to track farmers’ specific contributions to an aggregated lot purchased by customer
- Connected view of various artifacts relevant to each of the participants on the network
- Certificates made available online through a cohesive audit process on same network
Benefits
Single source of truth, cost and operational efficiencies
Unified, single source of truth collating and linking warehouse updates, shipment related artefacts, transfer of custody and invoicing
Optimized reconciliation efforts across stakeholders and disparate IT systems
Reduction in certification costs by digitizing documents and sharing them transparently with ecosystem stakeholders
Seamless integration with existing application to ensure current state process is not impacted
