Consumers and businesses are pushing toward an increasingly digital world. When businesses enter this evolving landscape, it’s critical they offer today’s consumers the seamless digital experiences they expect. Unibright aims to offer such an experience with the Unibright Framework. The Framework has 9 templates for different use-cases fully developed as of now, and many more to come. In this article, the focus will be on the Multi Party Approval Template — helping with the integration of suppliers’ approval processes. In the world of today, the trend in business processes is without a doubt moving away from slow and manual methods, towards automation and centralization. Automating your business processes has a number of benefits: completing tasks faster, increased visibility among your organisation, standardizing outputs, reducing errors, and lowering costs. Although automation is not something new and has helped countless companies become more efficient and productive, a promising change can be seen on the horizon. In particular, blockchain workflow automation can assist organizations that rely heavily on transactions and document-based processes. With the integration of blockchain, these companies can take the next step in their digital transformation.
You might wonder why is blockchain so instrumental for the approval processes within a business? Blockchain is not crucial for workflow automation, it however brings many benefits
Secure Transaction: The blockchain is both distributed across multiple systems and immutable, which means that no one can alter the blockchain alone.
Increased Data Integrity: Blockchain networks are self-auditing, since the network verifies the data every ten minutes. All parties are immediately made aware of changes and can access the data history.
Increased Transparency & Accessibility: All records in the blockchain are shared and publicly accessible among all nodes in the network.
Compliance is Greatly Improved: Because records in the blockchain cannot be modified once saved, regulators can easily use this audit trail to verify compliance.
Fraud is Completely Eliminated: The blocks in the blockchain are linked to each other and secured using cryptography, making them almost impossible to falsify.
Transaction Costs Decrease Dramatically: Using the blockchain removes the need for third-party intermediaries to handle transactions, charging an overhead fee in the process.
Linking business process management (BPM) and blockchain technology is done through smart contracts. A smart contract can be thought of as an automated middleman that handles the transaction between two companies. These smart contracts are “self-executing” software protocols that help people exchange any information of value. The contract’s dos and don’t are coded into the program itself. Smart contracts are linked with blockchain technology, and they can be approved or rejected based on the information verified by the blockchain.
Smart contracts can be used together with BPM software in order to integrate the contracts in existing business processes. For example, with the Unibright Framework process maps can be used to create and visualise the desired flow of smart contracts at important touch points throughout the company’s workflow. The users can also access raw data on the Framework, which would help find bottlenecks where a smart contract does not run as expected. The BPM software can then send push notifications to ask for approval, rejection, and/or when contracts are about to expire and they need rejuvenation. Furthermore, on the Multi Party Approval template allows users to extract information from the smart contracts and use it in other processes, such as triggering an event. Data from other processes can also be brought into the smart contract.
The Multi Party Approval Template brings efficiency and allows companies to work together even though their legacy systems do not allows such a luxury at the moment. To exemplify, imagine your company builds cars and the car-parts need to be ordered from several suppliers who are situated in several countries. Your company might have a supply chain that works with several different parties involved and everything is delivered just in time. These parties might use internally different softwares or email approvals or anything else that is company-specific. With the Unibright Framework’s Multi Party Approval Template, these internal characteristics would be connected, and still though everyone uses a different software in its specific company, all the parties involved will be connected, and will be able to see the approval process and time stamps of the car part orders/deliveries on the blockchain. Moreover, our solution creates a digital trail of transactions which can be stored as a Blockchain that is practically impossible to falsify, making audits much smoother. Auditing and compliance processes will become faster and more efficient, transferring the benefits of blockchain technology to the customer in the long-run.
To further clarify how the Multi Party Approval template benefits all stakeholders we will focus on the way insurance companies settle and handle claims. Insurance companies still send a physical paper check when issuing payments to their customers. Insurance claim checks are often payable to two or more payees. The current inconvenience of multi-party checks are wide-known in the insurance industry. At least two parties need to have physical possession of the check in order for them to claim it, and most of the time all parties need to be physically present at the bank in order to deposit it. Not only does this take time, but it’s also very inconvenient. Using Unibright’s Framework, a Multi Party Process involving all the stakeholders involved in the disbursement of the insurance money can be created. Below we have visualised how such a process would look like
Blockchain technology is one of the major ways that automation and business process management will evolve in the near future. Unibright is here to offer use-case-specific solutions such as the Multi Party Approval Template, in order to allow companies capitalise on the advantages of blockchain without hiring expensive developers and halting current business processes.
Below, you can find four more examples of how the Multi Party Approval Template can be used in the real world.
Product Pass Approval
A jewellery company develops new necklaces which are about to be manufactured abroad, and then distributed by the company-owned web shop. The approval process involves different departments and consists of different steps. Some of these steps are dependent on the fulfilment of other steps, and some are accomplishable independently.
Unibright conformant smart contracts interact by setting states of their respective approval. The current state of the approval process is accumulated in a central smart contract which holds the control flow and implicitly decides on the final approval state.
The current state of the approval workflow is implicitly represented by the available blocks in the blockchain. The blockchain acts as a state-machine: secure, reliable and deterministic. The Unibright Explorer can be frequently used to check the current state of the approval process, showing the complete information flow of all participating parties:
Invoice Release
Once an Invoice with all its information is entered into the Unibright conformant smart contract, the contract analyses the invoice, decides which approvals are needed and interacts with other smart contracts to request the needed approvals.
New Hire
The Unibright conformant smart contract gathers required information on the applicant (a ”background check”) and decides upon pre-defined rules and additionally requested data if an applicant qualifies for a personal interview. The smart contract can trigger notifications, request needed approvals and automatically send confirmations to the applicants and the Human Resource Department.
Approval Process Example
A product manager for a casual wear company is responsible to develop a design process of a new hoodie, and coordinate all departments and their respective approval on the ongoing design process. She checks the current approval state in the company’s ERP system and sees that Tom from the Marketing department just gave his final ok on the marketing materials. She sees that the next approval should come from buying department submitting the prime costs.
Anna from the buying department has to keep track of all offers of the different suppliers who would be able to produce the new hoodie. She has to get back to the other departments for detailed questions and only communicate by phone or email, as the suppliers are not integrated into the process due to security reasons.
The existing approval process works fine, except the supplier part. Anna has to do all the approval work manually, which is time consuming and error-prone. The blockchain can act as a state-machine: secure, reliable and deterministic. The current state of the approval process can be accumulated in a central smart contract which holds the control flow and implicitly decides on the final approval state.
Unibright’s “Multi Party Approval” Template offers a use case related predefined integration workflow for approval processes which can be customized. Steve from the IT department set up a private blockchain between all suppliers and the company. He designed the integration process visually with the Unibright Workflow Designer. The Unibright Contract Lifecycle Manager generated the needed Smart Contracts. The Unibright Connector integrates the existing ERP by automatically generated Smart Adapters.
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