Coca-Cola Bottling Manager to Use Baseline Protocol to Streamline Supply Chain Management
The Atlanta-based Coke One North America (CONA) services–a tech partner of North America’s 12 largest Coca-Cola bottlers, plans to utilize the Baseline Protocol as a technical backbone and establish the Coca Cola Bottling Harbor in partnership with Provide and Unibright.
This will enable a “low barrier network joining process for Coca-Cola Bottling suppliers” as per an update on Aug 3. The Baseline Protocol will use the Ethereum mainnet as a reliable, pay-per-use frame of reference while simultaneously providing extensibility for DeFi and asset tokenization use cases.
Baselining and Reducing Barrier to Network Joining
This comes a year after they successfully adopted a platform based on the HyperLedger Fabric, first implemented by the North America Coca-Cola Bottlers ran on the SAP BaaS.
Its main objective was to streamline operations between the different franchising bottling companies to make the whole cross-organization supply chain frictionless and transparent.
Baseline simply standardizes the exchange of information and critical commercial documents not just between two parties but between different systems or platforms using SAP and Oracle without a tailored software.
By relying on Ethereum, vital data will always be accessible and traceable meaning participants can check whether changes were made on related documents.
This drastically slashes the cost of integration allowing small suppliers without SAP to join as long as their applications are baselined.
Ethereum for Reliability
Although the Ethereum base chain will anchor reliability as the network is powered by distributed nodes, the Baseline Protocol will keep enterprise data in traditional systems of record.
At the same time, it shall enable automation of inter-organizational business processes which is always complex and mostly private.
This effectively rids current challenges like suppliers tweaking purchase orders or wrong deliveries being made due to manual errors on the supplier’s side.
Also, in the current setup, small suppliers who haven’t integrated ERPs are barred from integrating into the larger ecosystem mostly because of technical and cost barriers.
Eventually, the Baseline Protocol will allow invoice tokenization via a guided process, gradually standardizing inter-organizational business operations through a generalized zero-knowledge circuit.
Of note, by versioning commercial documents like invoices, all parties will agree on the latest, authoritative versions thereby resolving coordination problems being experienced in the current setup.
Moreover, there will be room for the extension of the current HyperLedger Fabric-based implementation.
In November 2019, the IOTA Tangle was integrated into HyperLedger Fabric as reported by BTCManager.
