KEVIN OTTO
Senior Director Community Engagement, GS1 US
GS1 US is a not-for-profit information standards organization with more than 300,000 members. GS1 standards are the
most widely used supply chain standards in the world. GS1
US administers the universal product code (UPC) bar code as
well as other information standards and data carriers. (www.
gs1us.org)
“In our cross-industry blockchain discussions encompassing healthcare, foodservice, retail grocery, apparel, and
general merchandise, supply chain visibility is the first use
case that companies are looking at to see how blockchain
can fit into their operations.
“Because GS1 already has universally accepted standards
in place for visibility that can be used in blockchain and
other data-sharing mechanisms, we are in a unique position to foster interoperability between blockchain users.
Essentially, GS1 standards are fundamental to the evolution
of blockchain.
“Unique identification in the supply chain goes beyond
product identification by batch, lot, and serial number.
Physical locations are being uniquely identified as well.
So when we talk about visibility and traceability, we refer
not only to the ability to mark the package, but also to
know which facility it came from and which facilities it was
shipped to. Trading partners are leveraging GS1 Global
Location Numbers (GLNs), which identify the location in a
supply chain, enabling and enhancing visibility.
“Because of consumer demands to know more about the
quality and origin of the foods they are purchasing, we are
seeing a considerable increase in discussions around the
ability to constantly monitor the quality of food products
as they go through the supply chain and then feed this
information into a blockchain. This need is making it less
practical to record and maintain this information on paper,
but it also presents a barrier to getting participants onboard
to record this data digitally, like at the farm level, where
they may not be electronically equipped.
“In food, companies in the supply chain definitely have
One hundred percent supply chain visibility cannot be
achieved without all participants in a blockchain ecosystem
on-board with the same standards of capturing and report-
ing data. I think it is necessary to have bigger players come
forward to push and facilitate smaller participant compa-
nies to come to the table.”
blockchain use case, I’m looking at the return on capital
investment. The capital investment may be significant, and
the cost/benefit ratio may be low. Are the people that need
to be in the network going to buy in? And how are we going
to divide up the costs? I think that in the future, what is
going to drive adoption rates will be the monetization of
the data.
“Another adoption control, as I see it, is the ability for
a distributed ledger network technology to maintain
various streams of data both privately and publicly. So,
for example, you may have a network that has a number
of suppliers and companies and customers, and they want
to see where the transactions are going. But they certainly don’t want things like pricing to be publicly available.
So, you have to be able to segment out what is private
data and what is public data, and you have to be careful of
standardization.
“And the last thing is the speed of the network. The speed
of network transactions is improving, but they are not cur-
rently at the rate they need to be to enable widely dispersed
supply chain networks to respond quickly. For example, I
and current blockchain technology does not allow for any-
thing even approaching that network speed in terms of the
response rates.
“Another great use case is chain of custody in the food
business—being able to track and trace chain of custody
from point of origin to point of use. This is another case
where you could have big data streams managed with data
integrity, creating a high trust value.
“From a data-security perspective, one of the myths
about blockchain is that it is perfectly accurate. It is not. If
you put bad data into a blockchain, the only way to correct
