Chain Custody
Keeping a ‘digital tab’ on physical goods as they move through a customer, product or other lifecycle can be critical, especially when stakeholders need to know the custodian of a specific item. Chain of custody applications help to make sure the right product, is in the right hands, and that there is an auditable trail of transfer of custody as physical items move from one owner to another.
This sample app provides an example of how to use QR Codes to track the chain of custody for a sensitive item. It also shows how the state or context of the item can be reflected by the workflow triggered by the QR Code. In this example, unique QR Codes are placed on soil collection bags, used to collect soil which is sent to labs for quality and composition testing.
The first time the QR Code is scanned, a chain of custody workflow is initiated based on the scan counter going from zero to one. From there, scanning the QR Code will allow the owner to register or transfer custody as the soil sample moves from soil collector, to laboratory, to data management system.
Requirements
Workflow of the App
The soil collection firm auto-generates a number of QR Codes to be placed on, and to correspond with unique soil sample bags.
The QR Code will be defined with an intent workflow that works as follows:
Upon the first scan of the QR, the soil collector can ‘register’ the sample as collected by entering field notes into the soil collection portal. Additional scan data such as time and location, are also captured and stored.
Upon subsequent scans, as the original soil data has been collected and stored, only a custody transfer workflow will be undertaken. For example, after the sample is collected and sent to the lab, the lab technician can scan the QR Code. Openscreen, recognizing the scan count is > 1, will direct the scanner to a chain of custody registry, rather than to the soil collection portal
By tying QR Codes to items moving from place to place in a value chain lifecycle, systems can keep track not only of who the current custodian of the application is, but also of the provenance, or past chain of custody of the item.