Episode #17
Ine is an inspirational leader. One of the co-founders of ubloquity, she is highly skilled at managing complex, global IT projects. Last Thursday she was recognised as a leading innovator at a gala event in Belfast at the Women in Business Awards.
Under her COO leadership, Ine has been instrumental in the scoping and project delivery of ubloquity’s secure borders solution for Fujitsu, and the establishment of the provenance blockchain for one of the world’s largest food manufacturers.
She mentors and guides more junior staff in the team, including award-winning Ellen Marks, who puts her success in no small part down to the support that Ine has given during her time at ubloquity. We all think the world of her yet she is so humble in return.
Under Ine’s leadership ubloquity is operationalising blockchain technology across global supply chains, optimising the accuracy and traceability of critical data to enable goods and services to flow more seamlessly.
Using multifactor verification, Ine and her team are able to create a single source of the truth, establish new levels of trust between producers, manufacturers, hauliers, retailers, government agencies and regulators.
With Ine’s deep supply chain expertise and experience, she blends best-in-class technology with cutting edge science to prove, authenticate, validate and ensure supply chain integrity, removing unnecessary friction, speeding up processes, and increasing the security of assets throughout their lifecycle.
Ine came up with the idea to design, build and test a new end-to-end digital chain of custody, utilising distributed ledger technology (DLT) to seamlessly connect the dots in a major food manufacturer’s supply chain. A world first. Her aim was to give the in-house compliance team an accurate, high-definition view of its chilli spice supply chain in real-time, via an online portal, utilising user-friendly dashboards.
Ine and her team mapped the entire supply chain from the drying yard – where batches of chillies are given a QR code – all the way through to final bottling. Although the organisation had the ability to establish traceability, relevant data was held in three separate and distinct systems. Retrieving it was time-consuming and inefficient.
In cases where a safety risk was identified further upstream, it was difficult to locate and isolate a specific impacted batch of chillies. Each entity in the chain could only see the data relevant to them, but it was not shared horizontally or from end-to- end. Also, the data wasn’t immutable. Records could potentially be overwritten, altered, or even tampered with.
Ine created the ability to tie the data together and access it at the touch of a button in milliseconds. The hidden and hard to reach data is now visible to every participant in the connected supply chain. As new information is written to the blockchain, everyone is updated at once – and displayed on an operational and user-firendly dashboard.
The ubloquity platform that Ine has created unlocks three key benefits:
• more efficiency in the supply chain – eradicating manual input by switching to scan and auto input, which is more accurate and efficient;
• proof of provenance and authenticity – providing the opportunity to charge a premium price for products and protect brand reputation;
• risk reduction – the immediate ability to recall a batch from supply, with the potential to save millions of dollars for each incident or issue.
Previously, had a regulator sought information on a specific batch of chillies – for instance the moisture content or pesticide use – finding the answer from multiple legacy systems could take a matter of hours or even days.
SPEAKERS
Dom Burch:
Welcome back to the ubloquity podcast with me Dom Burch. I’m absolutely delighted this week to welcome onto the podcast, one of our own and not only is it one of our own it is our Chief Operating Officer and award winning chief operating officer Ineke Rentmeesters. Now Ineke I’m alright calling you, Ine?
Ine:
Yes, sure. That’s easier, ha ha.
Dom Burch:
Good, we’ll get that out of the way. So, welcome onto the podcast. Now, before we get going, tell us a little bit about you. What was your journey to becoming the Chief Operating Officer of ubloquity.
Ine:
I was working for NSF in the UK. And because of Covid, they were reorganising themselves and focusing on their core, which is auditing. And we were part of an innovation team that was experimenting with Blockchain and different technologies to see how we could help them do the auditing. So as they repurposed the organisation, we were out of a job. So we decided with three of us, which is Kieran and Alin, my fellow co founders to start on our own. And we managed to raise the money, bought the IP of the product that we were working on. And that’s how ubloquity was created. So my passion is about food and technology. I love the combination of the two. So when the opportunity was there to do something with the two, and prove what’s right, to go into battle with food fraud, and do what’s right for public safety, then this was for me a win win. So that’s how it started.
Dom Burch:
And we used to sort of say that we kind of started out in life as a food provenance platform. And since then, we’ve diversified into doing lots of different things. But talk to us a little bit about the start point, then because that combination of food and being passionate about not just food’s quality, but where it’s come from, and then using technology like blockchain, to be able to then actually start to prove the provenance of something, whether that’s an ingredient or raw material. So that that was kind of like the Genesis if you like, wasn’t it, that was where you kind of launched ubloquity from?
Ine:
Yes, we had created a prototype to tag cows in the fields and be able to put those from birth onto the blockchain. So we wanted to prove the provenance from the source and the source is at birth So the tagging the animal was creating a DNA sample, putting that on the blockchain. So we could prove exactly which animal, what sort of asset identification is what we call it, that was the first block so we call it a Genesis block. And then we could tell the whole story of that animal as it moved from farm, off farm into the market moved along to abbatoir and to slaughter or, or export. So we managed to prove exactly where it was, at what time and what happened to it. So that was the whole idea. And the little ‘in-transit’ part is what caught Fujitsu’s eye when they were talking about Brexit and how we could solve or help them to solve the problems moving goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So, we kind of took a spin off from the transit bit of the animals. For that, if we can do this for cows, we can do this with basically with any product and follow the load of where it is in transit. So that we could prove to customs that the load has not been compromised along the way from point A so from the source to its destination, which would then help with the green lane solution as the Northern Ireland protocol envisages to have goods move forward and across the borders without having to check because everything that happened on the load or with the products as it was loaded, is on the blockchain. So that’s part of the another project that we’re working on is Atamai. So we kind of shifted a little bit from animals in the farm, on farm, we called ourselves the weirdos in the wellies, because we will literally with our wellies in the field, tagging the cows. And so we moved a little bit away from that. But we’re still very passionate about food, and food safety and food provenance. So we’re bringing that back home.
Dom Burch:
And those two things kind of combined, didn’t they when you were working with a major spice manufacturer. And that was where they had a particular problem didn’t they, where they were trying to authenticate that chilli pepper spice that ends up in a jar that you might buying Carrefour in Tesco or Asda, that all of the ingredients in that jar, you could prove where they’d come from, from the seed through the drying yard and so forth. Talk to me a little bit about that project. Because how do you even go about and I know you’ve got the brain the size of Belgium, right? But how do you go about going right? Okay, I understand the problem. Now we need to go map that supply chain before we get anywhere near looking at what the technology is that’s going to help to solve it. So just walk us through that process of how you address it.
Ine:
Yeah, so the challenge was indeed to provide traceability for the chilies and that the ideal situation would be where we could prove that the chilies in the jar were actually those chilies produced by that producer in India. And that was the challenge that we were given. We took it gladly. So we thought okay they are using different systems, supply chain management systems like an SAP systems or ERP systems already, but they were not connected. So the producers in India were using a system, the purchasing organisation from the spices organisation was also using an ERP system. And then you have the rest of the manufacturing, were also using an ERP system. So what we did was like, okay, there must be a trace, or a key that connects like a common denominator that you can find back in each of these three systems, even though they were just not connected and in different parts of the world. We try to put a layer on top of that, by finding that common denominator and linking it together on the blockchain platform. So one of the key things is that you will always find a purchase order or a production order, which refers to a batch, which refers to a bag. So there were different stages that we could unravel from the big puzzles, and put them all together. So we didn’t need to download the full system, which they didn’t allow us anyway. But we just managed to find that one key that links to the other part in another system. And that’s how we could put it all in connection with each other. So what we are good at is connecting the dots. And we were able to put that on our blockchain and create a dashboard out of that, that showed this whole lots of chilies in a drying yard in India, when they are being crushed, or reproduced and bagged and stored, and then moved on to a container all the way to the south of France and then reprocessed and recrushed and anything they do with it, until they arrive in a jar, we could prove actually that this one jar could be traced back to this whole lot back in India, and vice versa. And that was really exciting.
Dom Burch:
I was gonna say that, you know, you make it sound quite simple. But that process prior to being able to extract out that common denominator and put it together in such a way that you can have a dashboard at one end, and at the touch of a button, you can immediately go back and go right where did this jar come from. And, and, and if there was a problem, let’s say, you know, there was some contamination in a batch of chilli, or there had been some, you know, alien product put in there or whatever it was right? That you could quite quickly isolate that then at a touch a button. And that was replacing, I guess, quite a manual system. So all of those different technologies that weren’t talking to one another, required a person somewhere to figure it out, right. And that could take a matter of hours, days, or, or maybe weeks.
Ine:
And many meetings. Yeah, because you have to find the right person on the other side of the of the line to be able to, who knows which one is what, and it’s a big puzzle to unravel. If you have to do this manually. So we were indeed able to do this within seconds, which, which is a major cost saving for them. And also say there’s a lab result that that reveals that there’s something wrong with a batch of chilies because all the moisture, or they were not kept up to temperature, that they had to take this batch out of the production line, it was very easy to do this in one go. So this this gave a visibility that they never had before.
Dom Burch:
I was wondering are some of the challenges actually overcoming people’s resistance and actually winning hearts and minds within organisations. Because you know, status quos, and ways of working and how we’ve always done it around here. Sometimes those are the things that get in the way of bringing in change.
Ine:
First challenge was working in different time zones, because obviously the team in India is in another time zone, and the IT department of the spices provider was in the US and we were in the UK. So we had to mix and try to find the moments in the day where we were having an overlapping timezone. But that was not so easy in the beginning. The good thing is that everyone was very curious. This is new technology, what can we do? Everyone was very excited about the possibilities. We didn’t find so much resistance in the tech teams because they were actually really forward looking and hoping that this would be you know, revolutionary to what we would be doing. What we found was that maybe there was a little bit of a resistance to see like, what are we doing wrong? Are they only going to point out where it goes wrong, which we actually try to explain to them we see it as a positive we try to help you how we could do it better with what we fine. Because obviously what we detected were also lots of gaps in the whole process how you go about from the chillies to the processing facilities, there’s black holes, if you will want to call it, where the information is not so well recorded or where there’s no information at all and when lots of things could go wrong. So it was not about pointing out what went wrong so much, but advising as well as look, this is what we could do if we bring this technology in to make this even better and to make the supply chain more transparent, to bring more visibility in. So you could do so much with your food waste as well, you could see earlier in the stage like this, these chilies, for example, are not good to, for consumption on the long run that they can be used in, in an immediate state. So that would not be good for preserving. But they’d be good for another purpose. So there’s many, many things that we could help them do, and reduce food waste as well, for example,
Dom Burch:
The combination of that early work on farm where you were tagging cattle in Northern Ireland, with your wellies on through to then how that sort of moved into this Atamai Freight project with Fujitsu and secure transit. And then all of those aspects with the chilies where you’re kind of, you know, that provenance and that secure chain of custody all the way back to a drying yard, as you sort of bring those together, then that started to really transform into this is ubloquity today, right? And that ubloquity kind of does only one of four things or a combination, prove where something’s from, authenticate what it actually is, validate how it’s been made. And then this bit about ensuring its ongoing integrity, once it’s on the move, how do you prove and demonstrate that nobody’s tampered with it or that it’s secure, or it’s been held at the, at the same temperature. And that must be really exciting being involved in a company that’s what only just coming up to two years old, already working in some amazingly big cutting-edge projects.
Ine:
It is indeed exciting, yes, I love that we have a remote team, we actually created ourselves within the Covid situation where everyone was working remotely. And we saw that it actually works well. So we have a big empowerment. We give empowerment to our people, we have great people, and we don’t tell them what to do, because we don’t know all the knowledge, but we help we ask them to be creative and think along. So we give them a lot of power to grow with us, and to grow the company alongside. And that is really great. So we have people all over Europe, we have people in Scotland, in Romania, in Czech Republic, in the Republic of Ireland, in UK. And we want to grow more, so we have a nice mix of contractors and employees. And we all work together towards the same goal and the same objective. And we have a lot of fun while we do this. We have daily standards with our tech team. If you’re having a grumpy Monday morning, you should just join that 15 minute call and you’re instantly become happy. Because there’s so much fun and there’s so much energy in our team. It’s really, really inspiring and amazing. It helps, right that the frameworks and the structures and the best practices that you learn, having worked in a big corporate company, they come to life here, you know that we need it. But being able to start on your own, you can give it your own flavour. So this is how I think the ubloquity culture has the best of the two. My own experiences from before, has helped me to create and to help shape the way we do things in ubloquity. And that’s really cool.
Dom Burch:
It is cool. And you know you’re working in sprints when you’re doing development work for the likes of that spice company, what does that mean in reality, right? So for people who haven’t worked in a tech team, or maybe haven’t worked in a smaller company, what is you know, working in an agile way? How do sprints actually work? And how do you do that kind of feedback loop so that you’re always checking back in and going right? What can we learn? What can we do differently next time, what just talk through what that means in practice.
Ine:
So we have a product owner who defines the sprints, and who is in charge of making sure that all the user stories, and the epics are well documented and clear for everyone. So we have a big roadmap. And we split that up in smaller chunks, and we decide what are the features are we going to develop in this sprint, and the sprint for us is two weeks, so we make them short. And we make them manageable. So everyone decides together with the product owner, what are we going to do? What are we going to build in the sprint. And then if there’s more time, you can always take tickets from the backlog to help the sprints even become better. At the end of the sprints, we test, so we present what we did and we make sure that everything’s done. And once a month, we have a retrospective meeting where we discuss what we could have done better, what went well. And we create an action log on how on the actions that we should do to make things better. And everyone’s feedback is important. So we have a very, I would say, psychological safety in our team is really high. People don’t feel afraid to speak their mind. And to come up with ideas or to even to admit that something could have been better, which is which is actually what you want to achieve in a tech team. And usually we have a lot of fun. We tried different types of retros. Now we did a Harry Potter once, which was quite hilarious. Now we’re using a Lean Coffee way of doing this is another framework of how can you discuss in a constructive way, what happened well, what what could have been number and how, what are we going to do to make it better for the future. And there can be things that are technical that are sometimes it’s also about just collaborating or communicating better, or it’s about, you know, we should have a game night so that that can also come out of that, because it’s actually a really good way of keeping the team together and all aligned and still focused.
Dom Burch:
Now I want to turn the spotlight on to you. And I know this is you’re probably a bit uncomfortable this bit, because I’m sure you prefer the spotlight was on the team. But last week, you got recognised at an award ceremony over in Northern Ireland big prestigious gala event. And it was for Women in Business, but the award was around innovation and your leadership as being the most innovative in the small company category. Talk to me a bit about the event, because I’m sure it’s not the kind of thing that you go to all the time. But also what was it like? And how did it make you feel,
Ine:
Particularly as you grow in leadership, it’s, it’s good to have mentoring and people with who are in the same kind of situation, and you can help you with advice. So I was conscious that this is something I needed to do for myself, even though it’s not, it’s stepping out of my comfort zone. We’re still in startup mode as we couldn’t bring the whole team at a table over there. So it wasn’t my own. And I didn’t know anyone at the start. But I got to know a lot of great people there. And I received some great advice on that. How have you thought about this? And how should you should do this? Or have you done this leadership course, which is also interesting. So the networking part was really, really important. And it was also a lots of fun. It was really useful.
Dom Burch:
I mean, one of the many things that you bring to ubloquity, as well as all of the obvious stuff, right? You know, you’re our COO, and you know, you’ve been at IBM, you’re the master project planner, but also you guide and mentor other people in the team. And Ellen who in herself as an award winner from Women in Business last year, puts her success in no small part down to the support that you give. What is it about, you know, I guess paying forward a little bit and also, you know, bringing people up with you that you think is important, particularly when you’re remote organisation because all of the little coffee chats and the little arms around the shoulders are a little bit more difficult when you’re remote from one another. But that clearly is something that you invest a lot of time and energy in.
Ine:
Yes, I find it important. Knowing myself, this is something that I needed, as well as a junior and even though it was not remote, I found that I get a lot of how to say this? Energy and self confidence by talking to other people and who helped you and bring the best out of you. And that I think is what I like to do. Or what I like doing is seeing people and seeing what they really good at even if they don’t see it yet, and trying to help them, encourage them to bring that out and to do something with it. So I saw in Ellen a lot of potential, she’s, she’s really amazing. And I recognise some things of myself in her. And that’s okay, I have to help her feel a bit more confidence and do this. Because in a startup, it’s very chaotic, and you don’t really know your job description is not really a one and a zero kind of document that you know, from the beginning and the end what to do. So you have to be a little bit flexible on that and understand that things are volatile and changing constantly, while still being able to have a path forward. And I helped her to find that. And it was very rewarding for myself as well, because I think, Okay, this is how I should do it and maybe you can. And I learn from her as well on how she looks at stuff. Because you cannot forget this younger generation of people they have a different view, they grew up with this technology that we had to learn. So they’re like natives, and they have so much different views sometimes on how to, how to communicate how to do things, we are sometimes too formal, and we build too much buffers in it and sometimes being direct as is and straightforward in a respectful way, of course is so much better than just buffering and fluffing the message up. So this last thing that I learned from Ellen. But we have great talent in our team and then I really enjoy getting the best out of those people and making them feel part of something something good, something great.
Dom Burch:
Absolutely. Well, listen, we’ve run out of time, but it’s been absolute pleasure. Ine, thank you for coming on the podcast!
Ine:
You’re welcome!
