Integrate Lichen Into Another Solution

Lichen is a free auxiliary Internet of Rules component designed to run alongside or integrate within any e-commerce, e-payment or e-forms environment for context-specific discovery and utilization of transaction rules.

The following stories illustrate how Lichen will provide a way for existing solution providers to offer their clients an even more elegant algorithmic commerce experience.

Implementing Lichen within an e-Commerce Platform:
Once it’s launched, Lichen will make any transition to Universal Business Language (UBL) even more valuable for m operations than it already was.

To manage sales, Makena’s regional food wholesaler upgraded its Odoo commerce platform with two free/libre/open source Akretion modules that structure the essential data in Universal Business Language (UBL), and embed that UBL data within any PDF file used for placing an order or for issuing an invoice.

Makena’s immediate purpose was to provide clients the PDF documents they are accustomed to, and yet to also enable them to import these invoices into their Odoo ERP without manually encoding each field. He anticipated that this would prove useful in other ways too, given that UBL was recently adopted as an ISO/IEC standard (19845), and it is becoming widely implemented for electronic catalogs, price quotations, packing lists, waybills and certificates of origin.

By also integrating the UBL-conformant Lichen component into Odoo, Makena’s company can additionally offer—among other specialized services—online and store-front customers sophisticated automation of tax administration, including any exemptions and credits, price benchmarking for term contracts and subscriptions, and loyalty programs tailored to each customer.

Implementing Lichen within an Administrative e-Forms System:
Once it’s launched, Lichen will bring additional capabilities to a diversity of administrative systems.

At RollingBall Logistics Inc., Nguyan uses “ASYCUDA World” (Automated System for Customs Data) every day to manage customs and duties compliance for import/export administration of manifests and customs declarations, accounting procedures, and transit and warehousing procedures, as well as to generate trade data for statistical analysis.

Recently, the Lichen component was integrated to their instance of ASYCUDA, and then configured to run in the background to pull in logistics-control algorithms that increase the utility of ASYCUDA data. Now, when ASYCUDA displays a shipping manifest, Lichen fetches some useful external resources services:

• The LPI-Benchmarker, which compares the performance of each supply-chain network handled by Rolling Ball Logistics Inc. with the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index.
• The Value Map illustrates Trade in Value Added based on data from shipping manifests. This is produced jointly by the World Trade Organization and the OECD.

These and other benchmarking and comparative results delivered via Lichen are now incorporated by the IT group at Rolling Ball Logistics into a dashboard used by senior managers to monitor logistics performance relative to the industry. With both ASYCUDA and Lichen running, manufacturers, shippers and customers throughout each supply-chain network spanning multiple borders can also develop, and over time refine, their analytical algorithms to improve logistics performance. A specialized web-services market is developing for both free/libre/open and fee-based trade analysis algorithms.