Ricerc@Sapienza

We propose blockchains and smart contracts as enabling technologies for an innovative type of supply chain management, with the goal of achieving higher levels of collaboration between the companies participating in the chain, which in turn pays in the form of higher levels of profitability and economic health for the participating enterprises. Our proposal goes far beyond simply using blockchains as decentralized systems to track the origin and delivery of goods, which is what most of the current blockchain projects on supply chains are focused on.

Blockchain technology opens up new opportunities for Business Process Management. This is mainly due to its unprecedented capability to let transactions be automatically executed and recorded by Smart Contracts in multi-peer environments, in a decentralised fashion and without central authoritative players to govern the workflow. In this way, blockchains also provide traceability. Traceability of information plays a pivotal role particularly in those supply chains where multiple parties are involved and rigorous criteria must be fulfilled to lead to a successful outcome.

The integration of business process management with blockchains across organisational borders provides a means to establish transparency of execution and auditing capabilities. To enable process analytics, though, non-trivial extraction and transformation tasks are necessary on the raw data stored in the ledger. In this paper, we describe our approach to retrieve process data from an Ethereum blockchain ledger and subsequently convert those data into an event log formatted according to the IEEE Extensible Event Stream (XES) standard.