Gary Storr, General Manager of Trust Your Supplier by ChainYard, explained to us some of the challenges that the supplier information management industry is facing with disparate sources of information and the role blockchain can help to mitigate them. In this podcast you will hear how Trust Your Supplier creates a trusted source of supplier information and digital identity that simplifies and accelerates supplier onboarding, lifecycle management and the seamless exchange of information.

 
What is blockchain?
For Gary the best way to explain what is blockchain is what it isn’t. Blockchain is not a cryptocurrency, it’s a technology. It isn’t a programming language. Blockchain is a ledger that is organised in a sequence of blocks that are chained together. It is  distributed and it’s immutable. Blockchain is highly secure and decentralised, thus allowing for a multitude of participants to store information on the blockchain within the ledger. Security is assured by encryption and hashing technology making it impenetrable from current day hacking.

 
What is ChainYard?
ChainYard is a subsidiary of IT People Company, founded by Sai Nidamarty, its CEO. IT People Company is essentially an IT staffing business that was started in 1999.

IBM is a close partner to IT People Company, so when Sai noticed that blockchain was taking off he decided to spun off a new organisation called ChainYard with the intent for it to be a service organisation providing IT consulting services in and around blockchain.

Within a few years of launching ChainYard, Sai recognised there was an opportunity to create commercial applications on blockchain to address serious needs within the enterprise, such as Trust Your Supplier.

ChainYard is now a 5 years old organisation with 80 staff providing blockchain services and products.

 
Challenges of the supplier information management industry
Supplier information management is about getting information on a supplier. It is essentially an identity question which blockchain is particularly good at with regards to establishing an identity and to protecting it.

Traditional enterprises have traditional systems where identities are very segmented. It isn’t unusual for large supplier to have hundreds of identities within the system architecture. This is highly unmanageable. Systems could be storing, for a single identity, multiple versions of the truth for a contact with varying degrees of accuracy. Questions regarding data privacy are another issue.

Coming out of an enterprise and looking at the market a supplier would want to have a single identity as it deals with a number of customers. Similarly to a driver’s license or to a passport you want a single identity to be used across the value chain.

Consequently, there is an opportunity for efficiency, for speed, for reduction of cost, for reduction of risk and for compliance.

 
Trust Your Supplier (TYP)

IBM, a partner of ChainYard, recognised that there were some pain points within its supplier information. Both IBM and ChainYard expressed the desire to leverage their respective blockchain expertise to tackle those challenges. Trust Your Supplier was thus born to tackle not just IBM’s supplier identity issues, its supplier qualification and lifecycle management issues but also those of enterprises across industries in a decentralised manner.

Within its capacity as a partner IBM teams from TradeLens and Food Trust have con...