ServiceNow and the blockchain’s Business Network use case
By: Nicola Attico
Tags: Distributed Ledgers, Servicenow, Dlt, Blockchain, Hyperledger

WHY SERVICENOW FOR THE BUSINESS NETWORK USE CASE?

Blockchains have the unique capability to create business network, ecosystems that span multiple organisations, not necessary trusting each others. This is the case for supply chains, or the long sequence of processes that goes from the producers of products, to the customers. Today’s supply chain are scarcely digitized, and the visibility of the product is lost when it reaches customer hands. At the same time, customers have very limited visibility on how the product reached them.

This is because today’s supply chain don’t have any underlying platform, as no individual actor is granted with the privilege of owning this platform and when that happens, we have an ecosystem dominated by an individual organisation, that is not always good for customers. For this reason, each organisation works in a silos, lacking broader visibility. In the better case, each organisation can interlock with neighbours in the chain, one level behind and one level beyond themselves, through complex integrations or paper processes.

Moreover, also the end customer lacks visibility into the process and cannot identify the provenance of the product, or its components. Examples range from the industry of food, manufacturing, automotive, pharmaceutical, electronic devices, aeronautics, and much more.

THE PROBLEM WE SOLVE

We’re taking as example the automotive industry supply chain. The automotive supply chain can be incredibly complex, where any car can be made of more than 30,000 components, produced by a vast array of vendors. As the real case scenario can be very complex, we’re taking here a simplified approach with a Vehicle Lifecycle Network made by a few entities.

A Vehicle Business Network potentially include multiple actors like all part producers, vehicle manufacturer, car dealer, services, insurance, registration authority, and of course the driver. This business network –as we described– expands far beyond the pure supply chain scenario, including the aspects of the operations and supervision of the cars, including the ability to keep a public registry of cars in circulation by the regulator authority.

In the example we’re addressing in this demo, we will keep a much simpler view that include just three actors: the manufacturer, the customer and Vehicle Regulatory Authority.

We will assume that all these actors keep their internal data and processes on their own ServiceNow platform, while the overall process tracking and coordination happens on a shared blockchain platform, operated by the peer-to-peer network of organisations’ nodes.

This scenario allows to demonstrate:

increased visibility in the overall process without any single organisation owning the underlying blockchain, each organisation’s ability to manage their datas and processes privately within the ServiceNow platform –as island of trust– sharing only the information that is strictly necessary to run the process end-to-end, the ability for an external entity to access in real time the record of the cars produced and audit the overall process without the need to enter into the organisation boundaries, using a trusted feed of data, the possibility to provide a powerful user experience with the Service Portal on top of the “experience-less” blockchain platform, the ability for the different actors to use standard packaged ServiceNow applications and be immediately connected through the ledger, forming a blockchain ecosystem.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS

To build this scenario we used the ServiceNow instances and a private Hyperledger Fabric blockchain (https://www.hyperledger.org/projects/fabric). Fabric is one of the most visible projects of the Hyperledger consortium, which is better described as a Distributed Ledger Technology, or DLT. In a DLT, nodes are permissioned by a Certificate Authority and private smart contracts between a subset of nodes –a.k.a channel– are allowed.

On the ServiceNow side, Service Portal (https://www.servicenow.com/products/service-portal.html), Flow Designer (https://www.servicenow.com/products/platform-flow-designer.html), and Integration Hub (https://www.servicenow.com/products/integration-hub.html) are used for user experience, process design and integration.

The connection between the ServiceNow instances and Hyperledger Fabric is made through a classical REST API, a luxury that other blockchains do not provide. The business network is built on Hyperledger Composer, a not-so-graphical designer for entities, dependencies and transitions (https://hyperledger.github.io/composer/latest/).