How to Integrate the Maritime Blockchain TradeLens Within Hours
Integrating reliable and trustworthy track & trace data into your IT systems quickly and easily – a hands-on report on integrating the TradeLens blockchain with Workato.
Integrating reliable and trustworthy track & trace data into your own IT systems and workflows in a timely and simple manner poses a serious challenge for almost all companies, large and small. The solution is the foundation for efficient scheduling. The goal is to integrate established on-premise systems as well as innovative cloud solutions without having to launch a high-risk, large-scale project. Ideally, the flow of information should integrate seamlessly into existing and emerging structures without causing disruptions or friction in core business operations or triggering cost explosions. How can this conundrum be solved? Here is a hands-on report.
TradeLens - The Maritime Blockchain
The world's largest shipping company, Maersk, together with its IT subsidiary GTD Solution and technology giant IBM, launched a blockchain-based maritime track & trace platform in which all partners can participate — TradeLens. TradeLens aims to increase efficiency in container logistics supply chains by automating and digitizing interactions between multiple parties.
To this end, TradeLens has defined more than 100 events where data and documents are exchanged throughout the global supply chain, ranging from planned shipping times and Bills of Lading to customs clearance and insurance policies. These events are continuously populated by blockchain participants, and new information is consumed automatically. It is a constant process of give and take.
Role-Based Access Control
TradeLens follows a role-based access concept, into which every participating partner is categorized during onboarding to the platform. There are Ocean Carriers, Rail or Truck Operators, who fall into the Transport Service Provider group, customs and customs service providers, depots and terminals, as well as numerous other participants in the logistics ecosystem such as banks and insurance companies.
Each role is assigned permissions for individual events. For example, container loading and unloading are regularly reported by shipping lines or 3PLs, while rail transport companies report loading at the transshipment terminal, and depot operators provide gate-in/gate-out notifications. All these assignments are summarized in the so-called Data Sharing Specification Sheet.
OAuth 2.0 Authentication
Once the relevant events are identified, a so-called organization is created for the participating partner in TradeLens, along with an account in the IBM Bluemix IAM (Identity Access Management) cloud. To integrate the APIs into your own IT systems, the participating partner must create a technical user with an API key in IBM Bluemix IAM and register its Service ID in TradeLens.
This ensures that the partner can manage their accounts for using TradeLens completely autonomously, and TradeLens does not need to know or authenticate any usernames or passwords. This concept complies with the OAuth 2.0 standard, where the resource server (TradeLens) is separated from the authorization server (the IBM Bluemix IAM account managed by the partner).
Integration with Workato
After successful integration tests with Postman, you face the actual task: the automated transfer of data to TradeLens from your own core systems. In many places, the call for the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) team goes out—a process that is usually organizationally and technically complex.
Workato, with its low-code trigger-action principle, meets the exact requirements of modern integration platforms:
- Intuitive to use
- Scalable according to current needs (both technically and economically)
- Flexible regarding the heterogeneous systems to be connected
- Trustworthy regarding data usage
- Secure against attacks and misuse
- Stable and robust in terms of availability
- Low-effort to operate — ideally as a cloud service (SaaS)
Research giants Forrester and Gartner now count Workato among the leading integration and automation platforms available.
Recipe Construction for TradeLens
Common integrations are offered as ready-made "Recipes," which is what Workato calls its automation workflows. Each recipe consists of a trigger that initiates a sequence of actions. It is ingeniously simple, yet extremely powerful!
Out-of-the-box, there are numerous triggers and actions, e.g., for invoicing with TradeShift, recording a customer case in Salesforce, updating a customer service ticket in ServiceNow, or accessing IoT data in Splunk.
SFTP Trigger
The trigger for initiating an event in TradeLens is intended to be a new file on an SFTP server. In this specific use case, a leading European intermodal operator receives status notifications about the transport progress of containers from various sources: Has a container been loaded onto a train? Has a container left the transshipment terminal by truck? Has a train arrived at a port terminal? Has a new transport order been issued?
The connection via SFTP is a breeze in Workato: Simply add a connection, select SFTP, enter the login parameters such as username, password, and host key fingerprint — and click Connect. Done!
Two-Stage Authentication
Once the trigger is configured, you can proceed with the actions. First, TradeLens requires authentication in IBM Cloud IAM using the previously created API key. If this is correct, you receive an access and refresh token, which you use in the next action to authenticate with the TradeLens Solution Manager.
The access and refresh token—the response from this HTTP request—are then inserted into the request body for authentication with the TradeLens Solution Manager—child's play via drag-and-drop.
Data Mapping
In enterprise integrations, mapping the source and target schemas is usually a time-consuming challenge. In Workato, this is efficiently solved via a Map action, where the target schema can either be defined field-by-field or created automatically by uploading a target JSON document.
Because TradeLens has documented the event contents in detail via Swagger (OpenAPI 2.0) and the message model can be easily copied from there, a custom data model is created via copy-and-paste—effortless and completed in seconds.
Logging
Even though Workato logs all jobs, including input and output for each step, by default, it is recommended to log in an external source. Usually, logging solutions like Splunk or Datadog are used for this, for which Workato offers ready-made actions.
Conclusion
Speed, simplicity, and reliability. Modern technologies must embody these virtues to unfold their positive impact. Transport logistics, in particular, as the engine of global trade and prosperity, must take this triad to heart to meet market demands and successfully master the requirements of digitalization.
The multitude of necessary integrations and automations required to remain relevant and profitable should therefore not be seen as a problem, but rather as a welcome opportunity. With the right tools and technologies, it is not a burden but a pleasure, as even global projects on the scale of TradeLens demonstrate.
