June'22

The Essence of a Permissioned Blockchain Platform

As enterprises grow and expand their global footprint, they must collaborate with multiple partners. This requires curating and sharing information in a controlled manner where relevant information is available with appropriate business partners, enabling them to work more efficiently. It may also happen that competitors are part of the same value chain, serving the same enterprise and hence controlling the information exchange through permissions becomes even more critical. One of the most important aspects for enterprises is to have an encapsulated view where they can closely monitor each leg of the process and resolve issues promptly.

To meet such expectations is difficult as there are various constraints such as different organizational policies, processes, technologies, and a lack of interoperable systems.

Let us consider the business case of freight transportation, where the buyer places an order that a merchant fulfills. Three business partners are typically involved in such cases: the buyer, the merchant, and the delivery partner. Business partners such as buyers rely on only one system where the order is placed, but the merchant may have several internal systems to check and maintain inventory, and similarly, the delivery partner may have several internal systems as well. Let us take a quick look at the sample information provided during this process.

The buyer places an order and submits the information below:

• Name of the product
• Quantity required
• Product cost
• Destination location
• Mode of payment
• Payment instrument

The merchant checks the inventory and fulfills the order and submits the information below:

• Origin location
• Delivery partner name
• Expected pick-up date
• Expected delivery date
• Cash collection required (Y/N)

The delivery partner checks the availability of the vehicle, driver and plans to transport the goods from the origin to the destination location and submits the information below:

• Delivery agent name
• Delivery agent contact
• Expected pick-up date
• Expected delivery date

During this entire process, each business partner must view relevant information only, and it also may happen that based on some conditions, the information would be made visible to a business partner. Let us say the product being transferred is a high-value good, then the product name and cost may be hidden from the delivery partner. If the goods being transferred are perishable, then the product name may be displayed to the delivery partner.

The payment instrument details should be visible only to the buyer and not to the merchant. But the merchant can view the mode of payment and whether cash collection is required and then share relevant information with the delivery partner.

There can also be some common information, which must be available to all business partners, such as the destination location, delivery agent name, contact number, expected pick-up and delivery dates.

There can be numerous attributes in such a process. The likelihood of increasing the number of attributes increases as the business expands and more business partners are added to the value chain.

DL Asset Track™ is a permissioned blockchain platform with a feature called 'attribute settings,' which can be used to select appropriate attributes to configure properties for each business partner. DL Asset Track™ is designed inherently to solve complex information-sharing problems where a consolidated data view is available, and each business partner can view relevant information based on configured permissions. It is a modular platform that all business partners can access, provides in-built integration capabilities, and enables the ability to configure business workflows and set attribute level controls across various entities in the value chain.

Salient Aspects

• Select relevant attributes applicable to a particular business partner.
• Configure attribute properties such as marking it as mandatory, read-only, update only, hide from this business partner, hide from other business partner.
• Configure predefined values in an attribute.
• Configure conditions to show or hide attributes from a business partner.

Steps

Configure the attribute settings for a group node

1. Add a group node.
2. Provide basic information about the group node.
3. Select applicable attributes.
4. Configure properties of the selected attributes.
5. Set predefined values of the selected attributes.
6. Configure rules/conditions based on which an attribute can be hidden or displayed to the business partner.

Please find the info here