2023-1H Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG Report

Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG

Overall Health

The Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG continues to build the community and its impact. We held four webinars in the first half of 2023 and are now working on our first project: an ebook focused on Supply Chain and Trade Finance applications that use Hyperledger. Our LinkedIn page now has 3,945 followers.

We look forward to publishing the SIG's first ebook in Q3, hosting future webinars, and organizing additional projects. Our continued goal is to bring value to Hyperledger and to the community.

Issues and Challenges

• Current members have limited technical skills, so we are not yet able to create projects involving code.
• Several new members are joining regularly and asking how to contribute so we need to continue to create relevant opportunities to contribute. We would still like to see more enterprise participation.
• The SIG LinkedIn profile has more activity than either Discord or Confluence. We use it as our primary communication method.

Overall Activity in the last 6 months

• Tom Klein, Andrea Frosinini, and Alicia Noel are current co-chairs.
  
  • Alicia Noel became a co-chair in Q3, 2022.
  • Erik Valiquette resigned as co-chair in Q1, 2023. See thank you announcement.
• The SIG's first project is an eBook focused on Supply Chain and Trade Finance applications that use Hyperledger and are in active use, past the pilot stage.
  
  • More than 31 projects were considered for inclusion with a number of others not making the first cut.
  • 14 profiles, for projects active in more than a dozen countries on four continents, have been submitted for consideration.
  • This project has enabled non-technical SIG members to actively contribute, and promoted participant use of Confluence.
  • Profiles are now being edited. Active SIG members will choose profiles to be included in coming weeks.
• Four webinars in Q1 and Q2 have had up to fourteen live attendees and from 82 to more than 200 viewers on YouTube.
  • Pete Gowanlock of DLT Labs: Real Time Freight Invoice Processing platform - User benefits, including both reduction in dispute resolution processes and improved onboarding time for new carriers.
  • Sherwood Moore of the Climate Action and Accounting SIG: The Evolution of Climate Accounting and the New Measurement Economy: Solving the Challenge of Scope 3 Emissions Together.
  • Gary Storr of Chainyard's Trust Your Supplier Platform: Using Trust Your Supplier to Manage Partnerships and Data - The platform promotes business division collaboration and embeds data from third-party certifiers. Users experience reduced supplier onboarding time, supplier screening time, quality assessments, and performance audits.
  • Tram Vo of MOBI: Business Automation in the New Economy of Movement - MOBI's new standard for business automation, their pilots in vehicle and parts tracing, and the Citopia vinTRAK project, which includes emissions tracking.
• There have been 24 editions of the SIG Weekly News Digest in the first half of the year, hosted on the SIG wiki. The digests have highlighted hundreds of news articles related to supply chains, trade finance, sustainability, and related issues. Andrea Frosini is the main driver of this initiative and shares it weekly over the SIG listserv and our LinkedIn profile.
• The Hyperledger Supply Chain and Trade Finance LinkedIn page has grown from 2,754 to 3,945 followers, and is used to share SIG events and our weekly news digest.

Planned Work Products

• Writing additional use cases, to demonstrate how Hyperledger-based platforms are being used to achieve a range of industry goals and add value to the community.
• Hosting future webinars.
• Refreshing the Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG wiki page to make it more engaging.
• Revising the written SIG scope to reflect priorities of the new SIG created by the combination of the Supply Chain SIG and the Trade Finance SIG in late 2022.
• Pursuing opportunities to collaborate with other SIGs. 

Participant Diversity

• Still needs work across all dimensions. The biggest gaps currently observed are:
  • Women/POC: Ongoing.
  • Technical skills: Most active members have limited technical skills.
  • Geographical: Most currently active members are in the US, Canada, and Italy. We've also had members participate from India, China, Rwanda, England, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries.
  • Enterprise representation: Active representation from enterprise staff would enable us to pursue most relevant projects.

Additional Information 

Thanks to Tomaz and Daniela for suggesting an ebook for our first project, instead of a single case study, and sharing existing Hyperledger ebooks and an ebook template with us.

Jeff Pribich, a new member of the SIG, has been very helpful with the eBook - Thanks.