This document discusses using blockchain technology to provide traceability of inter-organizational business processes. It describes how business processes can be executed on a blockchain using smart contracts, with each process instance and task recorded as transactions. This allows anyone to trace the execution of a process across organizations. As a case study, it examines applying this approach to trace pharmaceutical supply chains.

1. Blockchain-based Traceability of Inter-
organisational Business Processes
Claudio Di Ciccio, Alessio Cecconi, Jan Mendling, Dominik Felix, Dominik
Haas, Daniel Lilek, Florian Riel, Andreas Rumpl, and Philipp Uhlig
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94214-8_4
Eighth International Symposium on Business
Modeling and Software Design
VIENNA: 3 JULY 2018

2. “Blockchains enable traceability”
+
“Business processes can run on blockchains”
Investigation
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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3. Preliminaries
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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4.  Transfer of (crypto)assets (Ether, Bitcoin, Litecoin, EOS, …)
from account A to account B
Transaction
Externally Owned
Account (EOA)
Externally Owned
Account (EOA)
Digital signature
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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5. Ledger
 Ordered collection of transactions
 The order matters!
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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6. Block
 Blocks group and collate transactions
 The order matters!
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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7. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Blockchain
 Blocks refer back to direct predecessors
 The order matters!

8. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Hashing
 Ideally, return
 fully random (numeric) codes
 for any value
 except for values given before
 same digest all the times then
 In practice: input/output (I/O)
 I: (bit)string of any length (message)
 O: fixed-length hash value (digest)
 No secret key
 All operations are public
© http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/days-gone-by-talk-of-ipswich-s-old-postal-service-provides-a-
first-class-delivery-of-memories-1-4691350

9.  Ideally, return
 fully random (numeric) codes
 for any value
 except for values given before
 same digest all the times then
 In practice: input/output (I/O)
 I: (bit)string of any length (message)
 O: fixed-length hash value (digest)
 No secret key
 All operations are public
 SHA-3
 Contest open by NIST
 Running for 3 rounds
 Won by Team Keccak in 2012
 Ethereum uses Keccak
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Hashing and standards

10.  SHA3("Hi there!") =
0xA61E6BF963B21B593248A1E0972D434
92E018E5E3B8300B0DF21D2D409EC8580
 SHA3("Hello there!") =
0xBCAA8219A31B43EE23EAEDE08AEBAE3
9CDBA2DD382D3579DE9463070E53DA6BD
 SHA3("BPM") =
0x5AAC68BEA69BB8F9197B69476C4A697
72183D1FA6BB622460072CF60E9047F71
 SHA3("BPMS") =
0x6573FBE16AD1CA39D560F9EA855BAD4
771D988D6E1635FAD7BF65CF8C7552BD1
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Hashing and preimage resistance
 Ideally, return
 fully random (numeric) codes
 for any value
 except for values given before
 same digest all the times then
 In practice: input/output (I/O)
 I: (bit)string of any length (message)
 O: fixed-length hash value (digest)
 No secret key
 All operations are public

11. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Distributed nature

12. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Distributed nature

13. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Distributed nature

14. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Distributed nature

15. “A universal platform with internal
programming language, so that
everyone could write any app”
[V. Buterin]
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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From peer-to-peer electronic cash system
to programmable distributed environment

16. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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A programmable distributed environment
Gas price (execution costs)
Input (and output) encoded data. Yes, hashing strikes back.
Smart Contract
Account

17.  Contracts in Ethereum
 live in the Ethereum environment
 execute a piece of code when called
 have direct control over own balance
and key/value storage
 Called smart because
executed by a machine
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ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Smart Contracts are autonomous agents

18. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Distributed nature

19. Getting there…
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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20. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Executing inter-organisational processes
on the blockchain
Weber, Xu, Riveret, Governatori, Ponomarev,
Mendling (2016): Untrusted business process
monitoring and execution using blockchain. In
International Conference on Business Process
Management (pp. 329-347). Springer.

21. García-Bañuelos, L., Ponomarev, A.,
Dumas, M., & Weber, I. (BPM 2017).
Optimized execution of business
processes on blockchain.
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Executing inter-organisational processes
on the blockchain
López-Pintado, O., García-Bañuelos, L.,
Dumas, M., & Weber, I. (BPM Demos
2017).
Caterpillar: A blockchain-based business
process management system.

22. From transactions to process traces
Enabling traceability of
process executions
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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23. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Pharmaceutical supply chain: a case study
https://www.gs1.org/sites/default/files/docs/traceability/Global_Traceability_Standard_Healthcare.pdf

24. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Pharmaceutical supply chain: a case study

25. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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The inter-organisational business process
behind

26. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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General approach

27. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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General approach

28. A dedicated
Worklist Factory SC
for every process
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Caterpillar and the blockchain
A dedicated
Process Factory SC
for every process
A dedicated
Process Instance SC
for every process instance
A dedicated
Worklist SC
for every process instance

29. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Tracking the process instance

30.  Worklist SCs are Smart Contracts
 Every task corresponds to a function
 Application Binary Interface (ABI)
 Contract descriptor
Concept
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ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Understanding the enacted task
Example
 Function signature:
function receive_order(uint256) public
 Corresponding ABI:
… { "constant":false,
"inputs":[{"name":"workitemId","type":"uint256"}],
"name":"receive_order",
"outputs":[],
"payable":false,
"stateMutability":"nonpayable",
"type":"function“ } …

31. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Understanding the enacted task
Example
 Function signature:
function receive_order(uint256) public
 Corresponding ABI:
… { "constant":false,
"inputs":[{"name":"workitemId","type":"uint256"}],
"name":"receive_order",
"outputs":[],
"payable":false,
"stateMutability":"nonpayable",
"type":"function“ } …
SHA3(“receive_order")=0xb20a9aa9619b9dc0c6a76bef0
c51350699afd93b05757350f8c20de71bc75e18

32. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Implemented prototype: instance scanner

33. BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Implemented prototype: task scanner

34.  Implementation based on Caterpillar tool
 More tools to come
 Framework implementation
 Assumption of unique IDs for process instances (Worklist SCs)
 Might not hold true in distributed scenarios
 Record linkage
 No connection to off-chain world
 Usage of Oracles?
 Object matching
 Step towards enabling process mining on blockchain
 Reading of transactions and (possibly) emitted events
 Event log creation
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ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Limitations and future investigations

35. INSTITUTE FOR INFORMATION BUSINESS
Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria
Building D2-C
DR. CLAUDIO DI CICCIO
T: +43 1 31336 5222
F: +43 1 31336 90 5222
Email: claudio.di.ciccio@wu.ac.at
www.wu.ac.at/infobiz/team/claudio-di-ciccio
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED TRACEABILITY OF INTER-
ORGANISATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES
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Claudio Di Ciccio, Alessio Cecconi, Jan
Mendling, Dominik Felix, Dominik Haas, Daniel
Lilek, Florian Riel, Andreas Rumpl, Philipp
Uhlig. (2018)
Blockchain-Based Traceability of Inter-
organisational Business Processes.
In: Shishkov B. (eds) Business Modeling and
Software Design. BMSD 2018. Lecture Notes in
Business Information Processing, vol 319.
Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94214-8_4