Solving a Logistical Nightmare: Imagining a Decentralized Identity Future at DB Schenker

Well thank you. And so we all order things, right? We order things from our favorite online stores and they just show up at your house, right? This is a little sort of inside baseball or inside football or how this sausage is made in terms of the identity aspect and some of the challenges from an identity perspective of how things end up at our front door. And so you heard the title again, my name is Aubrey Turner. I lead the executive advisor practice at Ping Identity and I'm pleased to be sharing the stage again with this gentleman here. So my name is James Norton.

I'm responsible for identity and access management at Shanker at the moment. And maybe just a short introduction to Shan, cuz I'm not sure if everybody knows about that. Shanker is a company established in Vienna, Austria in 1872. And as you can see, 150 years, we've got a lot of history. The only way you can remain relevant over 150 years is by making sure you adjust, you adapt. And therefore, we are looking with Ping together at how the future might look like.

Now, an integrated logistics provider, we offer air, ocean, land, transport and contract logistics services to our customer across a, a myriad of different verticals. To be able to make that all happen, we've got an ecosystem of e-services. These EVA services enable us to be able to, to provide the right services to the right customers, to the right partners at the right point in time. Yeah. So do you have any Formula One fans in the audience?

All right, cool. Yeah, well I'm a big Formula One fan.

So this, this, that support kind of inspired this slide here, but as James and I were discussing this topic and the problem statement, time is money. And for those of you that follow Formula one, the difference between starting in first, second, third, fourth can be hundreds of a second. And those are some of the challenges that James and his business are dealing with. Now we're talking about logistics today, but we think our vision and what we're sharing will be applicable to retail, healthcare, and other industries as well.

So whatever industry you're working in, just kind of keep that in the back of your mind. So James, maybe you wanna delve into a little bit more about what the transient blue collar worker challenges that you're seeing as a result or as it pertains to the logistical aspects of what Schenker does. Right. So unlike some of the maybe bigger companies in the world, which are only focusing on white collar workers as a logistics company, we have a myriad of different types of users. And a lot of these are blue collar workers. We have especially a focus on transient workers.

Now, transient worker would be a, a term that we use to describe blue collar workers that we kind of have in our workforce, provided by subcontractors and other people, other companies, but are not directly working for us. Just to think about that blue collar workers in themselves in our world are often restricted in, in how we can work. So we don't have laptops, we don't have computers, we don't have mobile phones sometimes for these people. We also don't have processes which you might expect that are standard across all of our supply chains, all of our customers.

There are some customers where we can't take any of our own devices in, which means in a lot of different customers, we've got a lot of different ways of having to think about what is the process, what kind of technology, what kind of software do we need to use. As you can imagine, the usability, the user experience of this kind of software isn't focused on customer. That's a little bit like what we see in the identity world. It's really diverged and workforce usability, especially for blue wa collar worker and these kind of logistics applications is often a disaster. Yeah.

So we're, we're, we're stuck in the past a little bit, right? So we're trying to build something or envision something that's more agile while also being more secure. So just to kind of give you a little bit of the scope of the problem, cuz I think that's important for you all to understand what this really, what the impact is for Shanker.

So James, why don't you talk about kind of what that scope looks like Here. Just Looking at the numbers. So if you think about our transient workforce's, the, the 104,000, it's three times as big as our, you know, fixed employees and blue collar workers. And that fluctuates significantly. So if you imagine we're coming up to Christmas, we have to be able to increase, we have to scale up to be able to get all of the different packages, different items from A to B in preparation for Christmas. What happens after Christmas? We don't need a transport or anything anymore.

So that number drops off. So if we've got a, a highly complex set of systems, we've got a, a workforce which keeps varying in size, then we really have a a, a challenge in terms of finding out how, what should these people been able to, to, to, to do. Yeah.

So the, the scale of the problem is, is really massive pairing that with the need to sort of quickly onboard and offboard, again, employees that may not be equipped with the right devices, you can kind of begin to imagine the scope and and size of that challenge. I, I know that, you know, there are several other sessions and, and tracks here at eic this, this year around decentralized identity, but I, we thought it'd be important just the level set. So this will take two questions, two seconds terms of what it is, and again, really like what you've heard since, since you've been here.

Is this a, a paradigm shift in terms of how we do identity and moving more from, you know, centralized control to one that's decentralized? The idea that we can put us as in more control of our entitlements, our authorizations, our claims, and moving from like third party trust to first party trust, you know, issuers us and again, verifiers part of these decentralized identity model. I know this has been said, or if it hasn't, it should be, this is not absolute, this is not, you know, there's a fundamental question about whether you and I want that level of control, right?

And whether we will ever fully deprecate centralized identity access management systems. I don't think we will, but this is the crux of our vision in terms of transforming how we, again, move to a more agile, more secure approach to, again, making sure that packages end up on your front door when they need to. So that's what decentralized identity is. So let's talk a little bit about what the vision is and what sort of some of the pieces and parts are. James kind of talk through what, what we think that looks like. So simplified without going into all the details.

Our vision is to be able to provide an experience for our transient workers, our blue collar workers that really mimics what they do in their everyday lives, right? So we know how we interact with our own smartphones. Why can't we do something like that in the workforce to allow us to be able to, you know, reduce the onboarding complexity. So a little bit thinking the idea of ride share, when that started maybe 15, 20 years ago, we found that there was a, an obstacle in getting people who want to get somewhere with cars.

So ride share came in, brought those together and allowed people to get where they wanted to go more, more, more conveniently. And we can envisage this as being something very similar. We can offer services that need to be fulfilled, we can then identify employees, transient workers who are qualified, entitled, capable to fulfill those, we can bring them together to therefore increase our efficiency and in the end help us reduce the problem of getting stuff from A to B in seconds. Yeah. So think of this as a very sort of task oriented model that is accelerated.

I, I've heard the term like, you know, x, y, z on steroids. Like, so this is kind of like an idea of being able to on and off board these users kind of, you put this whole thing on steroids and some kind of wallet. It could be a smartphone, could be a cloud wallet, could be a security key, whatever it is. But these claims, these authorizations, what you're entitled to do, stored in this wallet, portable, reusable. So some of the same ideas and concepts that you see from a decentralized identity perspective applied to logistics and scale is critical.

So, so that's kind of the, the sort of the vision, you know, talk a little bit more about the, the concept, and again, there's a lot going on on this slide. We won't kind of get into sort of all the kind of nitty gritty details. We don't have the time technically by the way this is possible today we can do this. That's not necessarily the challenge.

Obviously, you know, other elements will, will kind of present as obstacles to making this a reality. But James, talk about the concept a little more and what you kind of envision as a way to maybe get this moving forward. So we as Shankar offer a platform for connecting logistics company, especially in the land transport in Europe, to be able to pick up containers and ship from from A to B. And what we can envisage the idea would be that we actually provide our partners with more transparency of what's going on.

The same with our customers, but neither of those really care about what's happening in the middle. Now, one of the, the issues that we have in the, the logistics or the supply chain is that it's a very, very diverse kind of split market. And so what we can think about is that this kind of, of DCI solution would allow us to be able to provide more interoperability between the different suppliers working together to get packages from, from A to Z for our, for in the end both the partners customers.

Yeah, I've noticed on some of the other tracks, there's a supply chain assurance. We think this decentralized model can inject some assurance into supply chain. And at the end of the day, right, you've ordered something, you expect it to be there at a certain point, whatever it is. And in some cases, as James and I discussed, some of the items that they're transporting logistically have different security requirements.

So how do you verify that that shipper who's a contractor to a contractor, to a contractor is in fact the right person is does in fact have the right certification or the right credentials to actually ship and transport that, that product, right? So we think that this model will allow that those shippers to be authenticated have the right authorizations to, to move packages.

And like I said, the idea that this, this can be reusable and repeatable so you're not constantly having to kind of recreate a user, so to speak, so that they can have the right entitlements in order to again, move things from point A to point B. And so again, secure supply chain is part of what we think the solution will provide from an outcome perspective. We'll talk quickly about what the journey looks like. Again here, this is, this is purely conceptual. Like this is James and I over 12 times zones, by the way, he happened to be in New Zealand at, at the time.

And so we're working on this and trying to think about what this journey looks like. We think Fido Passwordless plays a, a role in this in terms of devices and mechanisms and we think we can embed, you know, the lines between identity and authentication continue to blur and we'll see that with authorization as well. The standards that are continuing to be developed from, and the various standards bodies that are working on decentralized identity, we think that's part of the journey.

Collaboration, as I mentioned, we're talking about logistics, but we think other industries, retail banking, financial services, healthcare goes on and on can benefit from this, from this model. And then fi finally maybe a verifiable claim that is inserted somewhere that is a familiar experience to these users that can be used to say, Hey, I'm authorized to move this from point A to point B.

And again, build that more secure agile approach with supply chain assurance. So that's what we think is the DCI journey, potentially what it looks like. Better efficiency, better security, better user experience. We welcome any challenges or opinions or ver or varying contracting or contrasting views on this approach because again, this is a concept that we came up with. Any an additional things that you wanted to add there or just want to talk about the benefits that, that we think could come from such?

I, I think, I think the one thing about logistics industry is we have low margins. So that journey and something like the logistics industry might take a lot longer to go through. That's why for us it's rather a mission or a vision. How do we get there? Because as you buy into to, to new hardware that's not maybe capable of doing stuff that's needed for, for dci, you need to make a a statement, where do we want to go? So it influences decisions that we make in the future.

Yeah, So, okay. In terms of benefits, of course we think there'd be lots and lots of benefits here. Just calling out a couple for, for the partners. If we can offer a solution like this, then we can really increase the transparency of what's going on in the complete supply chain for them. So they know who has done what, were they allowed, you know, are there legal regulations that we've gone through? Are there import export customs?

There are a lot of regulations, there's a lot of tape that we have to go through and partners can be hopefully more assured or completely assured that this is then fulfilled and fulfilled compliantly for our workers. Now we've got fluctuation, we can hopefully provide them a more attractive workplace if they are using systems which are closer to what they're used to using privately, then hopefully they're gonna be more interested in, in working for us. It also will help us of course as DB schenker because we can reduce our costs of training them.

They're gonna be able to follow processes in terms of, of of actions that they're used to doing in, in other parts of their lives. But it'll also help us to provide a better service in general to our customers. So if we are spending less time training people, onboarding people, we can focus more on getting goods from A to B. So what we also envisage is this is somehow of a platform for the industry to be able to work together better so that we can pass off information to each other.

As I said before, we don't usually maintain the whole supply chain for our customer, for our partner, it's diverse. So we might be handing off to one of our competitors or handing off to another competitor. We be believe that this will allow us in the industry to standardize more, have better interoperability, and in the end that's gotta be better for all.

Yeah, I mean the, the, the fact remains that in some instances, in some cases, right, you may be ordering a consumer good and you know, it's maybe not a big deal if it doesn't show up on time. We think this model has potential to, well we know the situations in cases where lives are at stake, particularly like in healthcare for example. And so again, you know, all of the things that James touched on, respecting people's privacy, having that higher assurance, expediting the process of onboarding folks, all of those things i, we think are some of the benefits.

And so with that, you know, the, the kind of un unlocking the future with decentralized identity, what we think that looks like, again, we're kind of imagining the future. This is really an art of the possible conversation.

And I, I think the call to action for all of us is, and again mentioned, talked about collaboration with partners. So it'll take standards, it'll take not only the logistics industry but other industries to kind of lean in and understand their use cases.

We think, you know, seamless experiences as James touched on more efficient, you know, deployment of labor, making sure that that thing does get from point A to point B, securing these interactions, resilience, you know, I I continue to hear that as a kind of key, key criteria, particularly in this part of the world, given what's going on, not so far away and accelerating digital initiatives. So all of those things, you know, are part and parcel of unlocking this future.

And as I mentioned, this transformation is not only relative to logistics, but other industries we think will and can play a role with this and interoperability and all those things, I think are are key, key things. Anything you'd like like to add I think summarized very well. Yeah.

So, you know, digitizing a traditional, a traditionally analog industry is part of what we're talking about here, right? So that's a, that's a key aspect of what we think unlocking the future could look like. We've got about a few seconds, are there any questions or, or comments for James or myself? So do we have any questions from the audience?

Okay, yeah, Gotta be fast. I mean we have more, two more questions from the online audience.

Oh, okay. We'll try to get to those quick, quickly. This is a compelling use case. Sorry Andrew bud, for my proof. This is a compelling use case with lots of advantages. What's making it hard to execute? I mean the, the need to invest the, the margins, right? Particularly in, in the logistics business.

And James, I don't mean to speak for you. We've got entrenched centralized identities systems fundamentally do you and I want to own the management of our own identities, we've gotta, I'm not sure those of you that have kids, if your kids will be ready for this type of model, perhaps potentially their kids. So a lot of challenges, a lot of obstacles, the technology's there, it'll just take some investment and recognition of the opportunity Time. The biggest thing I think it's against us is time logistics industry is traditional. We've got 150 years. You can't change that in a year or two.

So it will take time, it will take people to, to buy into that. So, yep. Awesome. Okay. Thank you. You too. Great presentation. Thank you very much.

And yeah, Very much. Yeah. Thank you.

You, I see. Cheers. Thank you very much. Thank You very much.