Motivation
The Boot-X project was inspired by a list of use cases from the Catena-X project as well as the new supply chain act and formulated requirements for a sensible and feasible use case.
The use case the team developed for Boot-X, is to build a Gaia-X compliant system for exchanging data in (automotive and other) supply chains for fulfilling the legal requirements arising from the new supply chain law.
To make this possible, a dataspace is to be set up and an “Advanced Smart Service” is to be implemented on this dataspace, which builds trust in supply chains without betraying interests worthy of protection, such as trade secrets or the structure of the supply chain itself.
Workflow
Advanced Smart Service for trust in (automotive) supply chains
We see three levels in the above diagram:
Top Level
At the top level, we see the papers with the declarations of principiles (signed by the CEO or
so) are scanned and fed into the system as PDF files.
In this step, the scanned file is supplemented with
the data required for an automatic check of the document that takes place later. These are a few data fields
that are present in the physically and need to entered by the person uploading the document to the system.
Middle level
At the middle level, we see a section of a supply chain of
an automotive supplier. The arrows between the individual boxes
symbolize the relationship between these companies as suppliers
and
customers.
In each step - during the selling process -
each
company on
stage “n” must ensure that all it’s suppliers on stage “n-1” must
have
the DoP-documents (without our system, this would happen in a
old-fashioned process by ending the paper).
At the end of
the
chain of
companies, there is the car factory and the salesrooms of the car
manufacturer where the customer buys a car. Each of the mid-level
companies uploads their documents to the shared dataspace.
The final end of the whole chain
At the final end of the whole chain is the customer who, for example via a QR code, could validate the validity of the chain of documents live in the showroom, to ensure that the selected product has been manufactured in compliance with the standard. At the lowest level, we then see a symbolic representation of the dataspace. The dataspace makes it possible to pull the digitized documents in a chain that resembles the structure of the supply chain. By means of the Advanced Smart Service it is then possible to validate the chain as a whole in a process of backwards pulling, and hereby to prove to the customer that all (social) standards have been met during the production of the product.