In this podcast we look at the amazing opportunity reforming contracts with self-executing contracts can have on insurance, distributed ledgers and beyond. To take us through this journey we are joined by Rory Unsworth, who until recently was Swiss Re’s Director at Smart Contracts Counsel.

Rory has a background as a UK lawyer with a focus on insurance litigation civil law. In recent years he pivoted towards legal engineering as it is more fun than traditional legal practice because it is about solving new challenges, working in teams and delivering projects.

A legal engineer is someone who helps to change legal processes by leveraging and creating adoption. Both of those things, leveraging and creating adoption are tools, based on all types of technology, from text mining to blockchain, AI, semantic, whose purpose is to support lawyers and experts.

During his stay at Swiss Re, Rory had the chance to re-engineer the way Swiss Re works around its contracts and manages contract risk. He has now recently left Swiss Re and is moving into the consultancy space.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger. A ledger is a type of record keeping system. It allows you to note the state of your asset or of your transactions with those assets.

A distributed ledger, it's a new concept because it's shared across a network

 

What are self-executing contracts?

Smart contracts are bits of code that order the code to take action when a contractual condition is satisfied. They're not actually contracts. It's a misnomer. They are “if, then” conditions that execute individual actions, usually with a view to automating or driving contractual conditions. And those actions could be payments or value transfers.

Now a self-executing contract are like traditional contracts but executed by means of smart contracts. To compare it to the internet, it’s a bit like text with hyperlinks, you got the surface text, but there's another dimension underneath it which leads to an execution piece.

 

Example of iTunes

When you used to sign up to iTunes you were presented with a massive click to accept contract which apparently was longer than Hamlet by Shakespeare in terms of word count. This was the traditional contract that came with clauses and so forth which limited the number of devices onto which you could share the music you had bought a license for. You could share the music with five devices but in the old style of contract enforcement if you had shared the music with more than five devices you would receive a nasty lawyer letter asking you to cease and desist or they would ask you to pay a fine for breaching that contract.

This of course would have been impossible for Apple to impose and would have never succeeded as a business model. Apple removed that friction by using a smart contract to do two things:

* Contractual permission: to enable the customer to listen on several devices

* Contractual prohibition: to block the listening of music on more devices than were allowed.

In that sense contractual enforcement was automated and there was no need for lawyers. The code simply didn’t permit you to breach the contract.

 

Smart contracts potential to change the legacy landscape

Rory likes to use the metaphor of how self-driving cars are going to change the way our roads will look like and how driving will look like, as an experience, to describe the impact smart contracts will have on legacy approaches.

Contracting and driving are both complex acts which has the potential to be fully or partially automated with lots of benefits to users.

In a future vision,

David Katz, is the CEO and founder of the Plastic Bank, a unique organisation that is using blockchain technology for social good. They make plastic waste a currency to fight ocean plastic and poverty. Listen to David as he explains to us how he transforms plastic waste into a unit of positive value that large brands are willing to pay for. Leading not just to the removal of plastic from entering the oceans but also providing a path to financial inclusion for some of the poorest communities around the world.

 

What is blockchain?

For David, blockchain is really a database that allows him to understand who has been contributing or changing data. Blockchain is a technology that enables true authenticity. It enables for value (money or good quality recycled plastic) to be transformed between corporates and into the hands of the poor in emerging countries without the need of intermediaries such as government or the risk of it being hijacked by malicious parties such as the mafia. Plastic Bank corporate customers want to make sure that when they buy good quality recycled plastic from them that the value is truly transferred to the people who are collecting the plastic.

David looks at authenticity in a binary manner. He looks at good quality reliable data as having an authenticity value of one. Data that he can’t rely on has a value of zero. The Plastic Bank needs to ensure that the material has as much authentic value as possible to really make it an incentive for the world to collect it and purchase it. For the Plastic Bank that’s what blockchain is and what it enables without the need for audit. Audit’s take time and the ocean cannot wait around.

 

Your journey to the Plastic Bank

David has a very philosophical view on the journey that has taken him to founding the Plastic Bank. He recognizes that every single experience and decision is what led him to this very moment. It is a mixture of all his journeys from the good to the tragic ones. There may have been some things that may have been more relevant than others like 35 years ago walking the beach on his way to school every day and observing all of the marine debris and being aware of them. Or as a 15-year-old calling out a mayday in the middle of the ocean whilst sailing with his father who was having a heart attack. Or was it the images of decomposing birds, whose bellies were filled with plastic, whilst walking the beach on holiday. Or was it his journey as an entrepreneur?

In May of 2013, David attended a course at Singularity University, in the seminar on 3D printing, he was able to witness a solid strand of plastic be manipulated with a heated nozzle to be turned in to a belt. He was told that the sale price of the belt was $80 whilst the cost of the material was $10.

At this moment he realized that the only thing that was giving that plastic a $70 value was its shape. It was the perception and view the customer was giving to that plastic that gave it a value of $80 and not $10.

So the same way we look at packaging, bottling and other disposable plastic goods where our perception of those plastic items is worthless. So it came to David that we just had to change the perception of the material and not the material itself.

David challenges every individual to think how their perception of every plastic, packaging and bottling they encountered was worth $5. Would we see any of that plastic in the garbage, street, environment or ocean? David believes that would be none. It’s not the plastic, it has nothing to do with the plastic but it has all to do with the way we perceive it.

 

Tackling plastic waste

John Reynolds is the CEO and founder of Coadjute. John has a background in enterprise technology and helping organisations optimize internally. In this podcast he talks to us about the exciting blockchain opportunity they've unlocked in the real estate and construction industry which is worth $10 trillion globally!

 

What is blockchain?

John perspective on blockchain is from a workflow and synchronization angel. Blockchain enables different companies to work together by keeping their different databases to stay synchronized, thus enabling everyone to have the same version of the truth. Coadjute looks at blockchain as an inter-organizational workflow that allows organisations to stay in sync.

 

Property marketplaces around the world are broken

In April 2019, John wrote an article entitled “Transforming the Real Estate Value Chain: Collaborative Innovation and Co-Operative Delivery”. In the article he states “Property marketplaces around the world are broken. It is slow, complex, confusing and costly to buy and sell both residential and commercial property.”

Anybody who has bought a house would recognize that it is a complex process because the consumer has to engage multiple businesses:

* Visit an estate agent to view a house

* Visit a bank to see how much you can afford

* Visit a mortgage broker

* Visit a conveyancing lawyer

* Visit a surveyor

Whilst each of those verticals have digitized and perform their job correctly the process itself is broken because the entire value chain is fragmented and it is down to the consumer to knit it all together. This can take four to five months and could cost 4% of the property value. It is an expensive, frustrating and time-consuming experience for most consumers. At Coadjute they believe that distributed ledgers and decentralized workflows can fix this problem.

 

Do you really need a decentralized solution?

There has been attempts to build a centralized platform fo the marketplace. In April 2007 the Land Registry invested £4.6m to the “Chain Matrix” a e-conveyancing type platform. It didn’t get the necessary adoption and was ultimately closed down in 2009.

Whilst in Australia the government mandated a e-conveyancing platform called PLEXA which was successfully launched in 2010 and has had over 4m property transactions of a combined value of $622bn go through it.

In the UK and other jurisdictions estate agents have invested heavily in their workflow tool and their internal business processes. Surveyors and conveyancers have their own tools that they have built up over 10 years. Banks have their internal systems. Taking a centralized platform approach would cost significant amounts of money, require heavy regulation which in turn could lead to a number of businesses shutting down. Because of these reasons a centralized approach probably wouldn’t work in the UK.

The API approach is an interesting one but one that still has challenges. How do you synchronize those APIs? How do you set the standards and processes to facilitate the synchronization of those APIs within a group of companies wishing to collaborate?

DLT and smart contracts allows those companies to orchestrate workflow ac...

Atlas Insurance is the first European insurer to convert to a protected cell company. In this podcast, Ian-Edward Stafrace, Chief Strategy Officer at Atlas Insurance in Malta, talked to us about the advantages an insurance cell can provide to Insurtechs to rapidly innovate within the insurance industry by effectively becoming an insurance carrier themselves without all of the overheads and capital requirements. Etherisc, the blockchain insurtech company, used Atlas’s platform to rapidly prototype their flight delay insurance product.

 

About Ian-Edward Stafrace & Atlas

Ian joined Atlas back in 2000 as a commercial underwriter. He rapidly got enamored by insurance by its logical approach since Ian has a technology background. Atlas is one of the leading insurance players in Malta and is structured as a protective cell company. Ian’s role evolved becoming a business intelligence analyst, a risk manager, a compliance officer, a data protection officer, to now as the Chief Strategy Officer. In 2006 Atlas converted from being an insurance company into a protected cell company, becoming the first European insurer to do that.

We first met Ian at the D1Conf on the 5th of November 2019:

 

What is blockchain?

Ian defines blockchain from the set of benefits that are derived from it. There are three aspects:

* Distributed database

* Smart contracts

* Potential for P2P activities

Distributed database gives multiple organisations, one immutable version of the truth, one database, eliminating all reconciliation processes that today tend to happen manually between those parties. This brings efficiency and transparency. The insurance industry has a very long value chain from insureds, brokers, insurers, reinsurers brokers, reinsurers and data providers such as telematics for cars and health care providers for health. Having a common distributed database brings numerous efficiencies and having a smart contract on top of it we have the potential for automated self-executing processes.

Smart contracts enable automated self-execution of claims, pricing determination, limits setting and transactions themselves which can happen away from the organization’s core systems in a way that is decentralised and trusted because the rules would have been set in advance of the events happenings. This is ideal for parametric insurance as there is a trigger, which can create a deterministic action upon a set of agreed rules.

The P2P side is more theoretical of bringing the insureds and the capital providers closer to each other. Automated matching of customers, carriers and investors depending on risk appetite.

 

What is a Protected Cell Company (PCC)?

Protected cell legislation is found around the world in various jurisdictions sometimes called, segregated accounts companies or incorporated cell companies. Malta is the only full EU member state that has protected cell legislation applicable for insurance. The UK has insurance linked securities.

PCC as a structure has a single legal entity but its shareholding is structured in a way where cells can have their own separate set of shareholders which are completely protected from the liabilities of any other cell or the core. This means that the PCC can act as a hub or a platform with a single insurance license. Third parties can invest in their own cells effectively meaning they can own a piece of Atlas. Their investment will only be used for their busi...

Raghavendra Kulkarni, is responsible for developing new Innovation Strategies and Business Ecosystems at Bosch. In this podcast we discuss not just internet of things (IoT) but also the concept of Economy of Things and how blockchain is an enabler for combining IoT devices to business models.

 

What is blockchain?

How we perceive Blockchain within Bosch. Three aspects to blockchain:

* Decentralisation

* Immutability

* Exchange of consensus - collaboration

Web 2.0 has created centralised platform monopolies. Internet of things (IoT) coupled with a decentralised ledger operates well within a decentralised ecosystem. The second aspect is immutability where you can have an immutable trail of an identity or of data. The third aspect is where you have consensus which is driven by collaboration. In principle what Bosch believes in is blockchain as a technology which will enable decentralised algorithmic consensus in the context of things.

 

What is Internet of Things (IoT)?

Raghavendra looks at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for things and has identified three levels:

IoT can be looked from there levels:

* First level is you look at a physical device. When the device is connected you look at what are the attributes of that device when it is connected to the web.

* The second level is making the connected device smart where you enable it to have automation attributes.

* The third level is making the device autonomous.

Raghavendra believes the IoT is all about the connection of the physical into the digital world.

IoT sits in all three aspects of the digital world:

* Edge - the connection between the physical object and the activities around that physical object are

* Middleware - is where IoT have to operate into systems of subsystems

* Infrastructure - the pure data

 

Blockchain and IoT

Bosch believes blockchain will play a very important role in enabling things from automation to autonomic.

IoT has enabled the automation of a number of things. Where blockchain comes in, is in enabling those autonomous devices to make decisions on their own, by making these devices into economic ones. That is the game changer opportunity in combining blockchain with IoT.

Bosch as a company predominantly operates as a company in sensor software and services.

In the context of blockchain, Bosch’s entire pursuit has been to enable sensing devices to become economic agents. When talking about economic agents, it’s about deriving value from those sensing devices, settling a value when you settle a transaction. Bosch believes blockchain would help connected smart devices become economic devices.

 

Bosch – Economy of Things

 

On the 15th of May 2019 at the “ConnectedWorld Event” in Berlin, Bosch announced a tagline “from the Internet of Things to the Economy of Things”.

Raghavendra explained that when we talk about IoT it is really a conversation that is restricted to the technology of devices being connected. Economy of things is the principle of taking a technology and combining it to a business model.

An example Raghavendra uses is if you take a machine and create a tender for it that states that for this machine to do an activity today it would cost $10. The operator would have to create cycles and set it all up. In an economy of things scenario, the machine could consider its own resources and availability and broadcast to a network its own contracts and availability.

Addenda is the first insurance blockchain solution we have recently covered on Insureblocks from the Middle East.. For this podcast we were joined by Walid Daniel Dib CEO and co-founder of Addenda, the blockchain for insurance subrogation ecosystem in the UAE.

In September 2018 Walid and his co-founders registered the company in the UAE and in the Dubai International Financial Centre (IFC). They set out to build a few prototype which didn’t quite work including a life insurance solution that was more of a solution looking for a problem. However as Walid puts it, they “struck gold” with the motor insurance subrogation solution that they’re currently working on.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is essentially a decentralised network. Where information that's shared between two participants is also shared across the board and everybody else in the room. Depending on whether it's a private blockchain or a public blockchain, that data could be encrypted, and or shared with others without them knowing the content of that data. Within an “old school” blockchain the public blockchain rely on certain consensus mechanisms, such as proof of work, and proof of stake to operate but more enterprise friendly blockchains rely on different types of consensus such as Byzantine fault tolerance.

 

The road to motor insurance subrogation

The focus on subrogation came be seeing the issues that exist in the UAE and in the MENA region in general with regards to how manual certain insurance processes are. Walid and his team wanted to start with something that’s both high volume and low value in claims. Property insurance has very high value but low volume. Medical insurance has a lot of personally identifiable information which can be tricky in the UAE. Motor insurance ticked all the boxes.

July 2018, Walid and his co-founders quit their jobs to focus building on their blockchain motor insurance which was ready by December 2018. They signed their first client in July 2019 and within the following month signed up seven more insurance companies.

 

Lack of Insurtechs in the Middle East?

There are four or five Insurtechs in the Middle East, but most are aggregators in the space. In Walid’s opinion, the Middle East is still a few years away from having some deep tech startups. There is more demand for technical talent than there is supply. However with the recent exit of large startups such as Careem sold to Uber in March 2019 for $3.1 billion and Souq sold to Amazon for $580m in July 2017. There's now a bigger appetite for both investors, governmental entities and even clients to take Insurtechs, whether blockchain or otherwise more seriously.

 

Insurance market in the UAE

In spite of being a relatively small country the UAE has more than 60 insurance companies. The top 5 insurers control more than 50% of the overall gross written premium whilst the vast majority control single digit percentages if not less of the market. There is now increasing activity in terms of mergers and acquisitions with a lot of gossip regarding a larger merger between Takaful.

 

The motor subrogation opportunity in the UAE

If Car A hits Car B, and Car A is at fault and assuming both have comprehensive insurance policies. Both respective insurance companies will fix the cars, but as Car A was at fault, Car B’s insurance will chase Car A’s insurance for payment. A large number of documents will then need to be exchanged:

* Three competitive quotations to show the cost of repairing ...

The GovChain Project is a wonderful project that aims to paint an accurate picture of the state of implementation and regulatory treatment of blockchain by the public sector around the world. Using a traffic light rating system, the report provides a rough guide to the varying levels of blockchain adoption across the targeted jurisdictions, identifying emerging patterns and trends.

We had the pleasure of interviewing two of the co-founders of this project:

* Lucie Munier is the co-founder and lead project manager at the GovChain project. She has worked in the blockchain space for over two years now and was formerly working at Qadre, the main sponsors of this project. She is now manager of the Sharing Economy UK.

* Lavan Thasarathakumar a former advisor at the European Parliament where Lavan specialised mainly on economic and military affairs and within that more specifically on emerging technology. Since August 2017, he set up Thasa Consulting which provides advisory services on emerging tech policy for government, supranational organisations and firms. As part of that he is a consultant at Hogan Lovells working within the Tech Hub. Lavan is a co-founder of the GovChain Project.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain isn’t particularly a new technology. It’s actually a combination of technologies we’ve had around for decades. It’s the combination of these technologies that is novel. Blockchain is a shared database, distributed among several devices, also known as nodes and uses cryptography to ensure immutability and accountability. Immutability is defined as once a piece of information is stored in the blockchain, it's impossible or very difficult to change that piece of information. Accountability is defined as visibility across the whole network, so people can see what transactions have happened, and where the information is stored.

 

What is the GovChain project?

GovChain is a publication that aims to paint an accurate picture of the state of implementation and regulatory treatment of blockchain technology by the public sector around the world.

GovChain team mapped out the regulatory and policy environment across over 20 jurisdictions to assess their degree of friendliness towards blockchain technology. They spoke directly to policymakers and entrepreneurs who have attempted to implement blockchain within their jurisdiction. They sought to find out what the key drivers were that allowed them to make this change, be at funding, political leadership, policy environment, cultural factors or something else to then draw up recommendations of best practices that other countries can learn from.

In addition to Lavan and Lucie, Helen Disney is the other co-founder of this project. It was born out of a conversation at a conference where the three co-founders realised the lack of information that was available regarding public sector implementation of blockchain. Victor Chatenay was brought into the team to conduct interviews and analysis across all of the jurisdictions.

 

Public and private sector symbiotic relationship to leverage blockchain

The benefits of a technology like blockchain could be more impactful in the public sector space. But what you do also need is the private sector to come in and innovate...

In this fascinating episode we are joined by Andy Martin,  Blockchain Business Design at IBM. For the last three years Andy has been working on how to create business case for blockchain networks. In this podcast he shares with us his deep wealth of experience in how to design effective blockchain business design. This is a must listen to anyone interested in establishing blockchain networks.

 

What is blockchain?

In defining what is blockchain, Andy focuses on private permissioned blockchain whose initial opportunity is in optimising shared business to business processes. Up to now the approached businesses took was in having a central intermediary to act as a central database to smooth out that shared process. The challenge is that both the quantity and the value of data has been growing very rapidly, leading to reluctance in businesses to share that data to a central intermediary.

Blockchain gives us a super elegant approach to sharing this process across the members of an ecosystem in such a way that no one person is in charge of the data. All the members can have a say in how that data is governed and they each have a copy of the ledger. Smart contracts are running on top of it and that is where the shared processes have been codified – who needs to do what to move the status of an asset as it moves across that shared process as trades of ownership of that asset are made. When a trade of ownership transaction is proposed to update the ledger, a consensus mechanism is used, so that all the members of the network can come into agreement as to what is the status of this asset as it as it moves through this process.

Blockchain has created a new asset which is trusted data at the level of the market. Privacy controls are put into place so that only the permissioned individuals are allowed to see the data. This new asset is effectively the foundation stone to truly innovate, to create new types of business and new types of marketplaces. This paradigm shift provides players within an ecosystem an interest to collaborate with their competitors in building that trusted data marketplace to then compete above it whilst combining your firm’s private data and capabilities and combine it with that trusted data.

 

Building business cases for blockchain networks

There are three big areas where building a business case for a blockchain network is different than any other technology:

* Incentive model

* Network effect

* Market level thinking

For any blockchain network you also will need an effective governing body that plays the role of defining the marketplace rules. It needs to be fair and democratic to ensure that everybody gets a fair chance and cut of things and a desire to increase the volume of transactions within that market.

 

Incentive model

Three different types of business cases have to be built to create an incentive model. Each of these business cases have to interrelate and create reinforcing behaviour:

* A solid financial incentive for whatever entity who is going to be bring this network to market.

* A strong business case for each of the members of the network to join it. If members benefit greatly from the network you charge them a fee to join it. Some members may be so valuable to the network that they either have great gravitational pull that they can bring other members to the network or whose data is so valuable that you may choose to give them free access to the network.

* The final case is for those who provides useful data to the network but don’t benefit greatly from being in the network. An incentive model is required for them to join the network.

 

John Carolin is B3i's new CEO. In this new podcast we had a very honest and open discussion about John's journey to B3i and his assessment of what the company got right, its business model and how they can better engage with brokers. We also discussed the very exciting announcement of the Cat XoL product deployed to customers’ production environments.

 

John Carolin, B3i’s new CEO

John is a chartered accountant and chartered financial analyst by training. He started off working at PWC in the insurance industry. However, John always had a desire to be a maker of things which is why he founded a number of businesses in South Africa including a small venture capital firm, a retail property asset management company and a B2B platform for traditional media and online broadcasters.

John moved to Zurich with his young family to join Antony Elliott at Zurich whom he had worked with 15 years ago. Antony, at that time, was Zurich’s B3i representative and knew of John’s journey and invited him to join B3i to help Zurich further support its investment in B3i and offer him as a resource to the venture. For John working at B3i helped him reconcile his professional training, his industry experience, his business life stage experience and his deep passion for technology and building stuff.

 

What is blockchain?

John thinks of blockchain as a form of DLT mechanism that initially with Bitcoin gave us a way to trust digital data and digital outcomes.

It provided a ledger list of transactions that couldn’t be altered without a huge amount of coordinated effort from a number of parties. This was transformational as traditional databases could have both the data and their audit log altered by a party. Blockchain provided the first mechanism to trust that the data hadn’t be altered.

Blockchain technology matured beyond being just a ledger with the likes of Ethereum providing tamper proof business processes encoded in algorithms. With smart contracts we had mechanisms where we could share automated processes in an immutable manner.

 

What has B3i gotten right and what can they improve on?

For John it is a long list of things that B3i got right and many things they could have done better.

He has looked at the many initiatives over the course of almost three decades within the insurance industry at automating aspects of the value chain, either through commercial entities or non-profit, standard setting bodies, and looked at what they have done well and what they haven't done well or where they haven't delivered on the promise that they brought.

One of the things B3i got right is to address market level inefficiencies. Their ethos of "by the market, for the market" has been very important for them and one of the early things they got right.

Structuring B3i itself is another. They had considered setting themselves up as a foundation that develops open source software. However, the decision to setting up as a for profit company helps create some sort of North Star that helps to clarify your decision making, keeps you honest, and execution focused when you have cooperative competitors that aren’t necessarily aligned.

Moving away from Hyperledger Fabric was a business decision they got right. They felt that Corda answered questions around scalability, data, privacy and security better than Hyperledger Fabric.

In this exciting episode we had the great pleasure of interviewing Dan Fritz and Marco Cuomo to hear about the exciting blockchain work they are doing at the pharmaceutical giant, Novartis. In this podcast you will hear about the wealth of experience they have developed by building POCs using Hyperledger, Ethereum and Corda.

Dan Fritz role is domain architect for supply chain. His department look at technologies that support supply chain business capabilities. They also look at emerging technologies and how they could be used to leverage and address the business needs.

Marco Cuomo is the Applied Technology Innovation Manager and his team is responsible for bringing in new technology into Novartis. He has been looking at blockchain for the last 2 -  3 years and in addition to supply chain has been looking at good use cases for using the technology.

Novartis is a global pharmaceutical company with about 100,000 employees in over 100 countries. It has a portfolio of prescription medicines, a generic division, and is increasingly focused on biotech including cellular and gene therapies.

 

What is blockchain?

Marco Cuomo recognises that defining “what is blockchain?” is a difficult question to answer. In Novartis they have developed a “blockchain elevator pitch” to describe what is blockchain internally to their business and to their internal customers. Blockchain is a shared means centrally controlled, distributed ledger. Every partner in that blockchain network has a copy of that ledger and it enables immutable recording of transactions. These transactions track assets without the need for intermediaries.

Dan adds that blockchain is a socio technical construct which is designed to be a win-win for all participants engaged within it. This requires a different mindset where all participants are growing the pie together instead of just slicing it up.

 

Beginning of Novartis journey into blockchain in 2016

The immutability aspect of blockchain is what attracted Dan and Marco to blockchain. Immutability is a key attribute that is desired in the pharmaceutical industry. This is an industry that is highly regulated, it operates under GxP, or good manufacturing, good distribution, good clinical practices, where the traceability of all of the processes and the accountability of all of the processes have to be proven and documented. A shared immutable distributed ledger seemed like the perfect tool in comparison to creating binders of paper that go into an archive for 10 years.

From a supply chain perspective, it was the promise that blockchain could provide more efficient transactions, reducing the friction between data silos and organisational silos through a shared ledger.

Additionally blockchain could provide the patient control of their own data instead of it sitting with a range of intermediaries. There is the opportunity for creating patient data marketplaces.

 

The LEGO Mindstorm Truck

In 2016, Marco purchased a set of LEGO Mindstorm Truck to create a supply chain scenario where a serialised product is delivered from a packaging line onto a truck which transports it across the supply chain from a pharmaceutical manufacturer, to a distributor, to a pharmacy and ultimately to the patient.

At every step of the way the serial number is tracked against the serial number of the previous b...