SAP And Lufthansa Launches An “Aviation Blockchain Challenge”

By Kapil Gauhar

SAP and the Lufthansa group have entered into a collaboration to launch a pioneering project: the “Aviation Blockchain Challenge”. This project is aimed towards exploring technological solutions based on blockchain that would enhance the aviation experience and bring about improvements in the industry in terms of creating better customer servicing, smoother supply chains and easier, cheaper and time-saving maintenance systems. It would also seek to make use of blockchain to bring about a greater degree of coordination and networking within the
various departments of the aviation industry.

At present, the market does have new developments coming up for dealing with mobility and travel issues, but these solutions have not yet managed to attain maturity. These applications and solutions are being developed for decentralised networks but have not yet found application in the airline value chains.

Thorsten Dirks, an executive board member of the Deutsche Lufthansa AG and in-charge for Eurowings and Aviation Services, stated that the group is looking forward to exploring innovation and conducting experiments in the intriguing and emerging field of blockchain technology. He said that blockchain as a technology is a modern
“game-changing” technology and tapping its potential in association with the SAP group presents exciting new possibilities. Dirks added that they are on the brink of creating an appropriate global framework for fulfilling the needs of entrepreneurs and businesses that deal with blockchain while nursing a passion for the field of mobility and travel. To do this, it is only fitting that the aviation firm teamed up with a firm with expertise in blockchain.

As executive vice president and the chief strategy officer, Deepak Krishnamurthy of SAP is serving as a co-sponsor of the first challenge. He echoed Dirks in expressing conviction in the ability of SAP-Lufthansa to foster greater innovation in this industry.

Recently, Unilever collaborated with data technology firm Blis to create a pilot platform that would foster transparency across the entirety of the ecosystem of data. Coming in the wake of the increasing need to ensure transparency in data management, this Unilever project sees the top player take over as the pilot partner to ensure that the service offered to data providers and advertisers is well-refined. The project is supposed to function on the IBM Blockchain Platform.

Sometime before the Unilever initiative, Ernst and Young also collaborated with Microsoft to come up with a blockchain solution to manage content ownership and royalty. This solution has been implemented by Microsoft in the gaming sphere already and is awaiting further applications in the traditionally tenuous process of managing
rights and royalty payments in the entertainment sector. Clearly, the use of blockchain to build fresh innovation ecosystems has clearly become the order of the day and the SAP-LUFTHANSA partnership is no exception to the rule.