Rapid-fire pitch: Keyturn

David Bryan believes he has an answer to reducing risk and increasing efficiency in the construction industry supply chain – what he contends is the most fragmented and complex of all supply chains – through a company called Keyturn.

Bryan, co-founder of Keyturn, along with colleague Kari Dwyer, Keyturn’s chief technology officer, demonstrated at MarketWaves 18 in Dallas how their software and accompanying specialized device they plan to launch in 2019 can address problems with data verification that is particularly prevalent, Bryan says, among stakeholders in the construction supply chain.

“In the supply chain, data errors can mean the difference in millions of dollars of delayed or inaccurate payments often to vulnerable small businesses, and it happens every day,” Bryan said. “Until we solve the data verification challenge in supply chains, data can be garbage in, and garbage out.”

One challenge they kept running into, he told the MarketWaves 18 audience, was the adoption of technology to enable trusted, data acquisition and verification.

In 2017, his colleague had witnessed a Fortune 100 company losing money due to shipping products on a truck without updating their inventory records appropriately, because the company wasn’t invoicing its customers for all products being loaded onto trucks.

“Everyone is buzzing about blockchain for how it can provide immutable data, but can we really trust the data that is being presented to the blockchain?”, Bryan asked.  

During the product demo, Bryan and Dwyer showed how a portion of their software works in tandem with the new device to load and unload trucks, and how it tracks the order and confirms delivery “with irrefutable proof tied to a contract.”

Several methods of order confirmation and verification are used from pickup at a manufacturer to delivery at a construction site, including barcode and RFID scanning, geotagging, and the ability to take a photo directly from the application, which stores it and logs it directly to the order.

“You have all the photos associated with the order, which can be a distributed ledger on the blockchain,” he said. Users of the product can then view the order details as they have tracked through the supply chain.

Bryan said Keyturn will be seeking transportation industry partnerships “to bring collaborative convergence” to the construction supply chain.

Visit FreightWaves to see more rapid-fire demos from MarketWaves 18. More of the popular demos, which aren’t allowed to use PowerPoint slides and must show the product in action, will be featured at Transparency19, May 6-8, Atlanta, Georgia.

MarketWaves 18 was held in mid-November at the Gaylord Texan Convention Centre in Dallas.