Enspan is a digital twin of your supply chain
Enspan provides a single, broad view of your supply chain by combining multi-party transactions in one place. We call this a supply chain 'Digital Twin'.
Today, this information exists in fragmented or duplicated form on each party's ERP or supply chain software.
As a result, you've likely experienced the following:
-
Difficulty finding information on supplier products, shipments and lead times
-
Manual data entry and duplication - e.g., when recording a receipt using a paper delivery note
-
Proliferation of email and telephone calls when resolving supply chain issues
-
Limited ability to predict supply and demand across multi-tier supply chains
Enspan allows all parties to a transaction to have a single place of truth and access to real-time information to automate processes, make more informed decisions and avoid risk.
Example of multi-party data types currently supported
How Enspan creates a Digital Twin of your supply chain
The diagram below illustrates a Digital Twin of a typical manufacturing and product support ecosystem (simplified for clarity).
To achieve this, each party shares 'events' as they go about their normal supply chain processes using their ERP as the system of record. After each ERP transaction completes, a copy is sent to the Enspan API which processes it into a supply chain event. Depending on the event type, it can immediately be viewed by the receiving party.
Enspan encrypts each transaction so that only the author and members of his/her organization can view it. The author can share it with other parties on the network.
While everyone on the platform can see all the transactions, not everyone can see the detail. This allows supply chain planners to get a true lead time on parts that they are planning on buying.
Enspan Platform
Backend and APIs
Developers can directly access our backend stack and data via our API library. This means that you can create custom applications that not only use and interact with Enspan multi-party data but can also be combined with data from any other source - allowing you to build and rapidly deploy custom workflows.
Our Sandbox API key is free so you can take as long as you want to develop applications.
Our backend uses standard restful APIs using the JSON syntax for all payloads - a common and easy way of transmitting data payloads.
Low volume users can access the web app directly and process transactions online. These will be manually typed in. High volume users will automate transactions from their ERP system using the API.
Data security and encryption
All data on the platform is encrypted using industry standard 256 bit encryption. This means that only authors of transactions and data can see that data. Viewing rights is automatically extended to any person in their organization - provided they are not restricted. Restricted users within the author's organization cannot view data that is flagged as restricted.
No other party on the platform can see your detailed data. The only exception is when you are shipping an order to a customer. In this case, the entire customer's organization and users have viewing rights to the shipment and any documentation attached to it.
Restricted users of your customers will not be able to see any transactions that contain parts that are flagged as restricted. This is useful for export controlled parts and data.
You can share your transactions at any time with other users or entire organizations.
Data authentication and Blockchain
All transactions on the platform are authenticated by public Ethereum blockchain. This means that the data you see on our platform is authentic and was created by the author. The basic process is described below. We are in the process of moving to a Layer 2 solution to reduce cost and increase capacity.
See API Documentation for a more thorough explanation of how we use blockchain.
