Case Study

The Customer

Our client is one of the major code generations and monitoring companies for various products in the Healthcare and FMCG sector.

They generate codes that are being used as Batch Number or other identificationnumbers to identify these products individually in the market. These codes are also being used to check the authenticity of the product to prevent counter feiting.

Wants to solve problems in their existing process so that they can involve more parties in the process to build the track and trace capabilities for any individual code generated, sent, printed, or being checked at any point in the process.

Key Information

Key Challenge

The existing process was a hybrid process including some automated and some manual steps, which are as follows:

• Every manufacturing plant has one software deployed and connected to the printer.

• Codes were uploaded manually, and software send instructions to the printer.

• The printer generates a printing report.

• This printing report was uploaded to the tracking portal.

When carefully analysed the existing process, we figure out the following issues which needed to fix into the process:

• Multiple points of failures.

• Unable to scale.

• High management cost.

• Vulnerable and prone to fail.

• Lots of manual processes.

• Offline dependencies.

GTEN Solution

Our solution was based on solving three crucial problems in the existing process

1. Remove offline dependencies and make it cloud-based.
2. Scaling possibilities when multiple parties are being involved.
3. Automate the manual process to make it less vulnerable.

The very first version of the solution was to have EPCIS developed and set up for all the involved parties and then move their transaction events into distributed ledgers on Blockchain.

The solution is divided into three major parts
1. Central Dashboard — cloud-based web application.
2. Capture — IoT based desktop application.
3. Distributed Event Ledger — Hyperledger based distributed ledger of events.

Central Dashboard: The central dashboard is being used to manage products, vendors, manufacturers, packaging’s, codes, and EPCIS Events.
Followings are the modules in the central dashboard:
• Products — manage all the products involved in EPCIS flow.
• Location — locations are the addresses of the plant, vendor or manufacturer.
• User — users are the admin, CMO, vendor or manufacturer•Code — codes are batch numbers for the various level of packaging like primary secondary, tertiary, etc.
• Events and Actions — events generated on each action taken on any above modules along with the action taken on those events.
The technologies used to build the central dashboard are:
• NodeJs — used to build RESTful APIs for central dashboard.
• React — used to build the UI layer of the central dashboard.

Capture: The capture is being used to capture data and installed at various locations, it also has IoT integration with various sensors and scanners.

Every vendor and manufacturer needed to install the capture desktop application with required drivers for their sensors and scanners to generate events.
The technology used to build capture
• NodeJS — IoT drivers.
• Electrons — desktop app interface for windows platform.

Distributed Event Ledger: The distributed event ledger is the EPCIS events ledger distributed among all the involved parties (vendors, manufacturers, CMO, and admin) using a private blockchain.

Each time an event is recorded a new block is created which goes to their assigned parties for verification and added to the chain once verified. The verification level is private and only involved the related plant and product along with the vendor and manufacturer.
The technology used to build distributed event ledger
• Hyperledger Composer — to compose the private blockchain network.
• Hyperledger Explorer — to explore, verify or reject the event inside the network.