Welcome to IBM Food Trust™! These quick start instructions will provide a streamlined guide for a user to get started quickly with IBM Food Trust. Please note that if more detailed documentation is required about a step the complete IBM Food Trust onboarding documentation is located at IBM Food Trust Docs.
1. Any IBM Food Trust users must create an IBM ID.2. Upon purchase of IBM Food Trust, your company's GS1 prefixes, and an email address for your organization's administrator will be requested. A notification will be sent when your organization with the correct prefixes is provisioned and ready for use by the administrator.
3. Log in to IBM Food Trust using the email registered with your IBM ID.
If there are multiple prefixes defined in the organization please define a headquarters for each prefix. A defined headquarters for a prefix is required in order to define products or other locations.
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5. Define any other facilities needed
6. Define the product(s)
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7. Use the process scenario builder to generate template XMLs needed to represent your organization's role in the supply chain. This can be done by generating your own product scenarios or by using the provided example product scenarios.
In this document, we are demonstrating the supplier scenario which creates a product and ships the product to a retailer. This scenario generates the least amount of required data to illustrate a supplier sending a product to a retailer.
Using the "Harvest and ship to partner" example from the process scenario builder a scenario in which a supplier creates a product in IBM Food Trust (commission), loads the product onto a pallet/container (aggregation), and then ships the product to a retailer (aggregation and dispatch advice) is created.
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8. Modify the generated XML templates to represent the events that happen to each instance (lot, serial) of the product as moves through the supply chain. For the purposes of a test this can be done manually however, long term, the modification of the XML templates will likely need to be automated, and integrated into existing data systems to generate events as they occur.
When modifying the templates to trace new events the eventID, eventTime, lot numbers, container numbers, purchase order numbers, etc would always need to be changed. Some fields such as the quantity may also need to be changed. Please consult the EPCIS Events section of the IFT Message Types documentation to learn more about each type of event. Please note the IFT Message Types also contains a link to each event's annotated XML. The annotated XMLs provide a detailed guide on each field in the XML. The annotated XMLs should always be consulted when modifying the generated templates to understand the details of each field.
The video below demonstrates some mandatory and optional changes to the XML templates generated in step 7 above.
9. Upload the XMLs to IBM Food Trust. For our example I have used the IBM Food Trust provided Swagger UI to upload the XMLs. However, in a true production environment with large volumes of data, uploading the XMLs will generally require programmatic automation to perform the upload.
If an error code is encountered when uploading the data to IBM Food Trust please consult the IBM Food Trust API Errors document to determine more about the cause of the issue.
10. Verify that the events uploaded appear in the IBM Food Trust user interface trace module. Note, if your supply chain partner(s) has not uploaded any data for the epcClass (lot/serial) in question to IBM Food Trust at this point you will only see your organization's events.
In our example at this point our retailer has not received our shipment and has not uploaded any of their data to IBM Food Trust. Thus, we only see the supplier side trace events and the IBM Food Trust generated disaggregation event.
11. Work with your supply chain partner(s) to ensure that they are or will be uploading events for this product. Once it is established that the partners are uploading events for the product verify the end to end trace with all partners in the supply chain.
In our example the retailer has now received the shipment and uploaded their XMLs representing their EPCIS events for the product lot. We then verify the trace on both the supplier and retailer sides to ensure all events for the product lot are visible in both organizations.
Supplier:
Retailer:
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