EY launches OpsChain Contract Manager solution

Ernst & Young (EY) has launched its OpsChain Contract Manager (OCM), a blockchain-enabled solution for contract management. EY OCM helps enterprises execute complex business agreements, supporting confidentiality, helping improve time efficiency and achieving cost reduction with automatic adherence to the agreed terms.

Announced during EY’s annual Global Blockchain Summit, EY OCM helps address the enterprise challenge of managing business agreements that run across internal and external operational and technology siloes. EY OCM synchronizes data across business partners and uniformly enforces key business terms such as standardized pricing, volume discounts, rebates and strike prices.

The solution runs on the Ethereum public blockchain, enabling decentralized operation in a trust-worthy environment. This helps avoid giving a strategic advantage to either a buyer or a seller and assists in eliminating the high costs of setting up and running a private network, as well as the risks that come from sharing sensitive business information with a centralized industry portal. The system maintains enterprise privacy using Zero Knowledge Circuits.

The EY OCM solution can be easily used in existing enterprise systems through a standardized application programing interface (API). Most business contract types can be supported including volume purchase agreements, standardized rate cards, volume discounts, rebates and price models that depend on market data feeds. The first test users of the solution are implementing complex Power Purchasing Agreements (PPAs) that include market prices, strike prices with minimum and maximum purchase criteria.

“We’ve identified from past client work that contract automation can improve accuracy while cutting cycle times by more than 90 per cent, and overall contract administration costs by nearly 40 per cent,” says Paul Brody, EY global blockchain leader. “With our zero-knowledge privacy technology, we have industrialized this capability, and we can now get these benefits at a fraction of the up-front cost. Deploying on a public blockchain is not only cheaper, but also much more scalable, helping enable many-to-many integrations on an open platform with no one company having an unfair advantage by controlling the network.”