Provenance is an SaaS platform that enables brands to track and display their supply chain information using blockchain.
For many brands, explaining how and where products are made is one of the more difficult socially responsible tasks. Systems spread across multiple countries, and products consisting of multiple parts manufactured in different locations, make for a complex path to the consumer. Years of big brands’ lip service to sustainability have also made consumers wary of businesses’ claims.
Hyper-local products and services are one method of creating radical supply-chain transparency. Many companies, however, must find other options. Provenance is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) data platform that uses blockchain’s* distributed ledger technology to authenticate the processes of a product’s creation and journey to the customer. The system helps companies share information about their supply chains and verify for the customer the validity of that information.
Blockchain allows Provenance to track materials and products, down to the single item level. By using the technology, shoppers, producers, non-profit organizations and businesses can be confident that the information being provided is secure, inclusive and publicly available.
Telling a story is a great way to connect with customers, and businesses can take full advantage by providing shoppers with point-of-sale information about the pieces and processes behind each product. There are three levels of Provenance membership – starter, pro and enterprise – with different amounts of administrative and communication support and a variety of item-level tracking capabilities.
The starter pack allows businesses to create a profile on the platform and includes information about the materials, people and processes behind their products. The pro plan costs £29 per month and allows companies to generate labels and unique product IDs to prove product authenticity, as well as add manufacturing stories to their e-receipts.
An enterprise account is priced on request and includes extensive item-level authentication as well as additional reporting support and options for testing and using beta developments. Provenance is also working with non-profits to find the best ways of digitizing certifications and awards in order to help provide customers with easily verifiable information.
Blockchain
A digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly.
The team says, ‘We envision a future where every physical product has a digital history, allowing you to trace and verify its origins, attributes and ownership. With our technology, businesses can easily gather and verify stories, keep them connected to physical things and embed them anywhere online.’
The platform uses two types of data system. One is for traceability and one is for transparency. For transparency, images and location data are used to build a company’s profile and product story pages. For traceability, items are directly tracked through the supply chain in order to confirm their attributes and identities.
Creating trust in a brand is integral to a business’s success, and blockchain helps to do that by independently verifying any claims made about a product. Because it has a decentralized structure and open yet unchangeable data, more and more organizations are looking to blockchain to answer tricky questions.
Taiwan-based startup Bitmark is using a blockchain algorithm to create distributed consensus on who owns what in the digital sphere. And in China, BlockCDN is using blockchain to create a decentralized content delivery network (CDN) to distribute online content more securely, evenly and quickly.
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Website: www.provenance.org
Contact: hello@provenance.org
Innovation name: Provenance
Country: United Kingdom
Industries: Access exclusive / Design / Marketing & advertising / Nature & sustainability / Retail & e-commerce