GoDirect is the name of the platform that will help prevent the falsification of important documents and will facilitate the sale of aircraft parts.
The American multinational company Boeing recently partnered with multinational aerospace conglomerate Honeywell. Both companies are working to track and sell $1 billion worth of excess airplane parts using blockchain technology.
These operations would be possible through a blockchain platform called GoDirect, which belongs to Honeywell and now would support the sale and track of airplane parts. In this sense, GoDirect will allow determining the origin of aircrafts parts to track them later. Besides, the platform will ensure these parts meet safety standards, which is the most important task that the tool will run soon.
Lisa Butters, general manager of Honeywell, informed that some of the available parts that the company has were uploaded to the GoDirect trade marketplace last weekend. This means that Boeing is almost ready to start using the development.
Multiple Advantages
The traditional aviation industry works manually by issuing paper certificates. In that way, it stores information related to each aircraft part, its original manufacturer, and the current safety standards they follow. But now blockchain technology will allow optimizing all this work.
Thanks to Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the authenticity of the relevant documentation related to the aircraft parts can be certified. Blockchain technology will also help prevent the falsification of documents. Taking into account that documents must go to numerous places in the traditional process, they become vulnerable to counterfeiting.
Increasing Sales
Butters considers that only 3% of the USD 14 billion market takes place online. For this reason, GoDirect Trade seeks to open the aircraft parts industry up to digital commerce and keep the information unalterable.
During its first year of operation, GoDirect Trade had sales of USD 7 million, according to Butters. By the end of 2020, Butters expects the platform to have made USD 25 million in sales, USD 100 million by 2021, and USD 1 billion by 2022. “We just celebrated our first anniversary. We are just trying to survive and have really good exponential growth”, she commented.
How Does It Work?
Honeywell’s GoDirect platform is a customized version of Hyperledger Fabric’s open-source code, launched less than two years ago. Hyperledger Fabric requires companies to have access to the platform.
Then, Boeing had to set up a digital storefront on GoDirect Trade. Once the storefront is created, trusted companies can upload their materials directly to the platform by uploading a text file to Honeywell.
About Boeing
Boeing is a company located in Chicago that designs, manufactures and sells airplanes, helicopters, missiles, and satellites. Currently, there are approximately 6,500 GoDirect users registered, representing 2,400 companies and the community promises to continue growing.
There are other similar projects. This month, it was announced that the MRO Blockchain Alliance established a blockchain consortium to authenticate commercial aircraft spare parts.
Among the members of the organization are Bolloré Logistics, Cathay Pacific, FLYdocs, HAECO Group, Ramco Systems, the International Aeronautical Telecommunications Society (SITA), and Willis Lease Finance Corporation.
In this way, different companies are using blockchain in a sector where over 25 million spare parts are processed per year. In the same vein, a technology like DLT could be very useful to automate and make some processes safer; something that, progressively, would benefit directly to all aircraft users around the world.
By María Rodríguez
