An employee works in an airplane engine factory of the French aeronautical supplier Safran, who helps … [+]
Boeing has added more than $ 1 billion in excess aircraft parts to GoDirect Trade, a blockchain platform designed to prove the origin of parts and ensure they meet safety standards, according to the platform manager, designed by aerospace giant Honeywell. Boeing could not be reached to confirm the transaction, which was revealed at the Hyperledger Global Forum for blockchain-based businesses in Phoenix, Arizona. Honeywell general manager Lisa Butters says last weekend’s transaction saw Boeing add excess parts, or parts they no longer needed, directly to the platform, which connects the supply layers in a single shared ledger of transactions that seamlessly tracks their movement.
Traditionally, aviation parts each had paper “birth certificates”, quality documents, and more attesting to the parts’ original manufacturer and current safety compliance, each to be physically moved from one place to another and re-enrolled in the new owner. catalog, making them almost impossible to sell online, where paper documents could easily be forged. But by moving each layer of the supply chain to the personalized version of Hyperledger Fabric from Honeywell, member of Blockchain 50, open source code on which everyone can rely, each list is linked to the images of the room and the corresponding documents for the exact part offered for sale, help not only to ensure that the part is there, but also so that the documents with which it is associated are not forged
Currently, less than 3% of the $ 4 billion in used aerospace parts sold per year is made online, according to Butters, who thinks this is about to change. In its first year of operation, GoDirect Trade had sales of $ 7 million, she said. By the end of 2020, Butters expects the platform to have made $ 25 million in sales, $ 100 million by 2021 and $ 1 billion by 2022. “We just celebrated our first anniversary “, she says. “We are just trying to survive and have really good exponential growth.”
Unlike the bitcoin blockchain, which everyone can rely on, Hyperledger Fabric requires companies to have access to the platform. In this case, Boeing had to set up a digital storefront on GoDirect Trade, according to a process that Butters takes about two minutes. Once the storefront is created, trusted companies can upload their own surplus and obsolete materials directly to the platform, such as Amazon, via an API or by uploading a text file directly to Honeywell.
In its first full year of operation, more traditional customers included airlines that need spare parts to relocate to their airlines. On average, Butters says that aircraft parts are reused four times before being taken out of service, which makes the validity of their quality documents particularly important. But the less traditional users, who could benefit from an increasingly digital process, are the aerospace arbitration traders, who previously had to rely on the slower paper process. “These are companies and people who buy aerospace parts cheaply and then try to find a buyer,” she says. “They are trying to negotiate a deal to make money.”
In addition to building the supply chain network for used aerospace parts, Honeywell is also using GoDirect Trade, which now digitally tracks all parts it makes – two per minute, according to Butters – for potential sales on the platform -form.
Earlier this week, Butters spoke to a panel with Walmart chief blockchain director Archana Sristy and American Express vice president Michael Concannon about their live blockchain and chain implementations. next step for the corporate blockchain. At the same time, the Butter team in Bangalore, India sent him a shopping list for ten items that they believe will help recharge their laptops in preparation for a project they will work on later. month.
Called “Alfred”, the project would automate the process of scanning documents from aerospace parts by reading and saving them with artificial intelligence. “All of these things are there,” says Butters, referring to the computer components, including an external hard drive, that his team asked him to buy. “They can put everything together, configure everything for what we are trying to put in place. This is how we work closely together, really at the bottom – we work in the weeds. “
