Smart Logistics With Blockchains

Cleantech Forum Europe, Helsinki Head of IoT Business Development

May 17, 2017 Mika Lammi, Kouvola Innovation Oy

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City of Kouvola: Industry
City of Kouvola represents the backbone
of Finnish wood processing industry.

Our factories produce over million tonnes

of paper and 600 thousand tonnes of
cellulose every year.

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City of Kouvola: Logistics
We are the railroad logistics capital of
Finland, by virtue of having the largest
freight marshalling yard in the country.

Kouvola hosts over 200 logistics

companies, and the Kymenlaakso region
as a whole acts as the home for over 500
companies, including the marine freight
port of Hamina-Kotka on the south coast.

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Trans-European Transport Network
Kouvola is the northern main node of TEN-
T network, a unique EU gateway to Russia
and Asia.

We host the Railforum 2017, industry

leading seminar on East-West railroad
logistics.

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Kouvola Innovation Ltd.
The top level operative business
development actor in the region.

Provides mid-to-long term vision and

project leadership.

Keep relevant and critical expertise in-

house, and rely on our domestic and
international networks and partners.

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 “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t
solve, I always make it bigger. I can
never solve it by trying to make it
smaller, but if I make it big enough I can
begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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The Problem
Traffic flows, information does not.

Supply chain and logistics industry suffers from sub-optimal flow of information
pertaining to the cargo traffic.

Basically, each company hosts it’s own operational data. There is very little voluntary
sharing when you go downstream any given supply chain.

SME level companies are especially afflicted by this – it makes planning, resource
management and efficiency optimization difficult.

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The Solution
Information must be shared

We will introduce a cargo traffic specific blockchain-based common data storage,

retrieval and sharing architechture and prototype solution.

It will be applied along the current, out-of-the box data storage solution, so company’s
data integrity is ensured.

It will simply add a level of sharing previously not possible.

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The Approach
Field work

Working with the logistics companies in the Baltic region.

This work package oversees the immediate contact, work and continuous support and
feedback with the actual companies which will be taking part in the project activities and
ultimately piloting the application we are developing.

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The Approach
Research work

Analyzing the data generated by the companies by using the blockchain application.

This work package is responsible for generating the framework of how to analyze the
operational data regarding the movements of containers across the corridors, and
determining exactly what effect does the use of blockchain has to the transport times,
and other core business performance metrics.

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The Approach
Development work

Developing the blockchain fabric, application layer and a locator device.

This work package creates the necessary software and hardware tools for the companies
and containers, which will be used in the process of gathering and generating the
relevant operational data for eventual analysis.

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The Goals
Reducing travel times

The project goal is to reduce end-to-end intermodal container travel times by at least
5% within the target area TEN-T network corridors, ScanMed and NorthSea-Baltic.

For example, cargo trains currently have an average speed of 10km/h on the
continental European rail networks. This is because passenger transport has always a
priority +1 over cargo.

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The Goals
Improving business performance

There will be several other positively substantial effects to the participating pilot
companies operational metrics.

All the benefits will be an indirect result of having access to more and much better
quality information along the whole length of the supply chain.

For example, resource management, planning and operational awareness will be greatly
enhanced.

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The Competition
We are not alone

There are dozens of commercial solutions in the market, as well as easily an equal
number of EU funded projects, all trying to achieve the same results through different
means.

We do not intend to compete with them, or even try to create a product for the same
market, as such.

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The Competition
We are alone

Ours is the only one which attempts to create a industry-wide disruption using blockchain
technology as the core architecture component.

We want our solution to be open source and as widely accessible to the relevant
businesses as possible.

There will be a host of business opportunities which can be built on top of our solution.

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The Collaboration
Friends and family…

We are well connected to the major global players in the IoT/blockchain field, as well as
the state-of-the-art academic parties.

The friendship and help of IBM has been a critical part of our success.

Our network of partners and friends is already substantial, and ever growing. The top
five universities and research companies in Finland are already working with us.

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 “How did you go bankrupt?

-Two ways. Gradually,

then suddenly.”

Ernest Hemingway,
‘The Sun Also Rises’

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The Next Steps
Escalating the inevitable

Once we have established a blockchain fabric as the host for cargo status information,
and we have reached a critical mass of users…

…the data will start to accumulate at exponential speed.

The blockchain fabric will essentially turn into a Big Data Corpus.

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The Next Steps
Better than human…

No individual human, and very few teams of humans can make sense or derive meaning
from Big Data.

It is a challenging task even for high level analytics platforms.

We want to take things to their logical conclusion.

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The Next Steps
…or rather, augmenting humans

With a follow-up project, we will essentially create an outline and a proof of concept for
a fully formed and regulated, artificial intelligence guided marketplace.

It will augment the analytics and processing for the transactions between goods
manufacturers and raw material suppliers, supply chain operators and retail and
industrial market operators.

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The Next Steps
We invite you to work with us

We look very much forward to working with you all in the meantime!

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The Thank-Yous
Thank you very much!

More information on the project and it’s progress can be found from

https://smartlog.kinno.fi/

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 ®

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