Open Enterprise Logistics – Hidden revolution in logistics behind а boring shell

And when I told you boring, I mean boring. I am talking about documentation work, lots of papers, traveling across the world, only for someone to be sure that some small part of the big process is done; now repeat for every small part… These are stupid amounts of paperwork, that someone have to do in order to transport commodities around the world. Now tell me all that paperwork is not boring… At least is not environmental friendly, because of the thousands trees cut down, to make the paper for all the stupid documentation needed… All of that does not look very interesting at all, but behind the boring mask there is a whole exciting new world of possibilities, waiting to be revealed. But first…

What is OEL?

First of all I have to point out that Open Enterprise Logistics (OEL) is a non-profit organization. Its purpose is to provide governance and resources for the development of OEL blockchain ecosystem. So… to the point. What (else) is OEL? The OEL ecosystem contains the OEL Enterprise Architecture, which is open source, the OPN Token and the members of OEL Alliance. OK, nice we now know who are they… but why they are here? What is their purpose? OEL’s purpose and mission is to remove once forever the stupid boring paper and cash dependent system in the supply chain. The paper based system is vulnerable to so many different physical and human based issues. Starting with the inevitably – the travelling time of the paper documentation, without which documentation nothing is payed. That means the money are waiting for some paper to move instead of flowing back to the economy and running the cycle faster. But there is even bigger problem involving people working with these documents. Firstly we are talking about human error, which can cause damage for the companies providers or their customers. And then it comes the much bigger problem of intentional frauds, using documentation changes. Not every employee is fair and there is ones intentionally stealing money and/or commodities from their job giving company or its customers, not even mentioning human errors, occurring from time to time.

But how do we address all these problems with only one single solution? OEL is here to provide that solution. The foundation is trying to create a distributed ledger technology, able to provide and record a digital agreement, more known as a smart contract. The system is decentralized, providing the security and distributed application (dApps) support. One of the benefits especially for the logistics industry is the easier proof of delivery. With some implementation with IoT or well designed dApp the conformation (proof) of delivery is an easy step as checking a barcode or NFC tag, instead of working with annoying documentation. The proof is instant, which means that the money can be paid and continue to flow, instead of waiting sometimes even weeks to deliver physically. The saved time is very important in the business and the better tools to save time – the better profits for the business. The other big problem is the human factor. Everything is very strictly traced, and every commodity’s road is perfectly known from the beginning to the end. Even if human error occurs the system will know where it is, where it is and who did it. And in case of a lot of errors, intentional or not, the employee that did them can be found and replaced in order to prevent more loses for the company and its clients.

Project Overview

The foundation is leaded not by just one person, but instead is having pretty complicated governance. The main one is the board of directors, containing the founding members, the advisory board (talented individuals with skills useful to the foundation) and the OEL Alliance (partner individuals or organizations). Let’s say something about the board members. One of them is Max Ward. He is experienced supply chain leader, well aware of how the biggest supply chains work and how they use technology to improve. Paul Good is also an experienced board member and a true expert in logistics field. Another member is Nicolas Husson – he is great engineer, working for OpenPort and OEL Foundation. The rest of the team are also an amazing professionals, skilled, experienced and motivated to create the future of in first look boring industry, that turns out to be really very important for the world and challenging.

I found very interesting that the social networks of OEL Foundation are not having thousand members, even collected together. The only social network with more than hundred members is telegram with around 750. They can be found also in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as some of the famous forums like Reddit. The posts are mainly informational, no promotions, no useless stuff. The information about news, commentary and OEL ecosystem can also be found in their blog (based in Medium). The numbers of members tells me that OEL Foundation is not very popular for now, but also their social networks pages are pretty new, so it is normal to not have that much followers. But there is also the option to just not target that many people and just look into targeting the right people, who are into the logistics market, but that is just a theory of mine so does not have to be considered as а fact.

The first time I saw OEL’s website was really confusing, because the design is looking like something from pure HTML (CSS less) era. Then I saw the implementation of modern web technologies. To be honest the website is looking really boring, even more boring than the website of “The Boring Company”. The navigation is “old school” too, but this does not affect the ease of finding information around the website. So, the design is simple, with clean white background, blue main accents and some green very rarely. The interface is not so intuitive then some modern websites, but definitely is easy to navigate, especially for someone used to the “old school” design. There are links to different locations, where can be found additional information about the project. I really like that the website just screams “Enterprise”, which is part of the name of the foundation. That shows that the designer has successfully expressed the feeling of serious enterprise project to us.

Open Enterprise Logistics are having really nice whitepaper. It contains twelve main themes collected in 56 pages. They are keeping the design theme of the website with its white background and blue/green accents. The information in it is very detailed and professionally written, to a stage where it is pretty hard for a non-professional to understand accurately what exactly the document is telling. That may be inconvenient for some of the users, but again as always in this project is screaming “Enterprise”. Using professional jargon it is very accurately explained in finest detail everything about the business side of the project, while keeping away from the technological side, because there is its whole “technical paper” dedicated to it. They are only pointing qualities of their project in the whitepaper and keeping the long explanations for the technical paper. That is convenient to separate the technologists and engineers to the business managers and entrepreneurs.

The technical paper is also a very professionally made, but this time in technological side of the project. It is having eight main themes collected in 68 pages. The information again is really very detailed look on the technology used, its implementation and even how the project is compliant with different world regulations (for example GDPR). A lot of qualities, pointed out in the whitepaper review are appearing for the technical paper too. The document is pretty hard to understand for a non-specialized professionals in the certain fields exhibited in the technical paper. And that again is showing the professionalism and the big scale of the project, because this type of specialized information is targeting certain people, well-aware of the field, willing to invest a lot of money into development of such a project.

Very important factor for a project success is the right allocation of the funds and for every cryptographic token is very important to distribute the tokens well. So, what OEL are doing? Firstly let’s talk about the token allocation. They are allocating 6.4% of the tokens for the pre-sale of TGE1 and 26% for the main sale of TGE1. 40.1% are allocated for reserves (TGE2) and stake rewards. There are 10% for OEL Foundation team and OpenPort Ltd each. 5% are going for the advisors and partners and the rest 2.5% of the tokens are allocated for community rewards. That is looking like pretty basic allocation of the funds, which can be seen in many other token distributions, but there is a reason for that, because this allocation has proven that is successful. OK, the tokens are allocated, but what about funds for sustaining the project? In the Infographics of the token can be found that the total proceeds are going to be $15 million in total. 1.5 m will be reserved for Legal and Contingency each. Other 3 m will go for alliance build and marketing. A nice chunk of 4.5 m are going to be used to further develop the platform. And the last 4.5 m will be used according to OpenPort service agreement.

Open Enterprise Logistics’ roadmap span is in the period behind Q2 2018 and Q4 2019. Everything is happening pretty fast in the roadmap from the beginning with proof of concept with OpenPort clients in Q2 2018, TGE1 in Q2 2018, development partner engagement in Q1 2019 to version releases of the mainchain every quarter of until the end of 2019. It is expected the project to be ready and working for the beginning of 2020. That may look a bit fast for such a big project, but the speed is a big deal in enterprise projects, before someone else executes the idea. The development have to be done fast, and a big team of developers are going to be needed for that to happen. But such deadlines are typical for enterprise projects, and are physically possible with team big enough. There is no wasted time in for the development, which means that the time is distributed very efficiently. I like that a big chunk of time is dedicated in preparing the documentation, to be perfected.

Conclusion

As a non-profit organization Open Enterprise Logistics are really looking into changing the way a whole business of logistics is working. They are providing the governance and the technology to create the future. They are aiming in one of the most problematic, but fixable place of the supply chain – the documentation, needed for proof of delivery, which is the trigger to unfreeze the payments. They are even able to reduce the human errors and cut any possibility for frauds. Everything in the project is looking very promising. I know I mentioned “boring” a lot of times in this article, but OEL are not just a boring foundation, they are existing revolutionary organization, aiming into changing a whole industry. And that is not just an industry; this is the logistics industry – the backbone of every other industry around the world. With faster and securer logistics every other industry can improve too.

A really cool detail about the project is that it is an open source platform, where every developer can create in order to improve it. Everything in the project is in amazing level, screaming “enterprise”, and showing that this project is not a game and not an investor hook. Starting with the website, the way foundation is governed, the amazingly written super professional whitepaper and technical paper and every other small detail of the project. This project is amazing and I see how can change the world to the better. Thanks to the amazing team of experienced professionals all of this can be possible, so I want to thank them for their dedication and wish them great successes. 

For more information refer to:

Website - https://oel.foundation/

Telegram - https://t.me/OELFoundation