CIAYN

At the {Tech: Munich} AI Hackathon, Janik, Alex, and I tackled the Tacto supply chain track.

The German “Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz” (yes, that’s the actual name, English: supply chain act) requires companies to monitor whether their suppliers adhere to human rights and environmental law. Software is needed to mitigate the resulting bureaucratic overhead. CIAYN - Compliance Is All You Need (in Europe) - is what we came up with in the ~25h we had.

At its core, it’s a social network of companies, each acting as a supplier and a customer (having a list of suppliers) at the same time. We calculate a supplier score, influenced by the country the company is based in (derived from UHRI data) and how many relevant documents it has uploaded. Companies can also fill out a self-disclosure form to publicly declare they adhere to everything required by the supply chain act. If a company hasn’t set up a profile with us yet, anybody can register it as an unclaimed ghost profile. In that case, an AI-filtered live newsfeed can provide a first assessment.

Now, acting as a customer, each company can also keep a list of their own suppliers. The result is a graph structure which makes it easy for a company to identify potential risks of its suppliers, or of its suppliers’ suppliers, or… You get the point.

I also found it an interesting social media project because it does not run into the typical bootstrapping problem. Generally, social media provides value as soon as the platform has a lot of users, so it’s hard to convince the initial ones. In our case, every supplier has an incentive to present itself well anyway, so a public CIAYN profile linked to from the company website is a gain, even without any other user on the platform. It’s also more comfortable than answering inquiries about supply chain act adherence from every customer individually. Additionally, customers want standardized processes of dealing with their suppliers, so there’s strong local pressure for each supplier if some customer’s other supplier is already on the platform.

It’s fully production ready (in case you don’t care about data protection). You can check it out here. (Also, here’s the demo and the repo.)

CIAYN won us the Tacto track. Thanks to {Tech: Europe} for organizing a great hackathon and to the Tacto team for having us!