Authenticating data exchanged in supply chains is never fully reliable without verifying how that data was originally captured from real-world events. Creating a digital record of the myriad steps and processes involved in producing a product in today’s complex supply chains comes with significant challenges. These challenges stem from two primary sources: unintentional errors caused by a lack of competency and intentional fraud. For decades, certifications and standards have been the most effective tools for addressing these issues, helping to establish trust and compliance across industries.

Development of supply chain certificates involves several parties. A Standards Development Organization, which is a competent agency, identifies a specific issue or risk within an industry and formulates a set of practices, rules, and measurable standards to mitigate it. Issuing Body (also known as Certification Body) evaluates supply chain companies for compliance with a specific standard. After conducting audits of facilities, materials, processes, or products, they issue certificates. Accreditation Bodies are independent authorities that evaluate and accredit certification bodies, ensuring they meet international standards for impartiality, competence, and reliability. Consultants or Advisors involve as third parties helping supply chain companies prepare for certification by advising them on how to align their processes, products, and operations with the standard.

The issued certificates are typically time-bound, with a validity period — often one year — after which the company must undergo a re-certification process. Importantly, certificates come with specific scopes detailing their applicability, such as the facilities, products, or processes covered. Misusing a certificate beyond its defined scope is considered fraud.

In today’s globalized supply chains, companies source materials and services from across the world to stay competitive. For small, medium, and micro-enterprises (SMEs), physically visiting distant supplier sites can be prohibitively expensive. Certificates serve as a trusted medium to convey the quality attributes and compliance levels of a supplier’s goods and services.

Given the reliance on certifications, especially in digital form, SMEs often use them as their primary means of assessing a supplier’s reliability and compliance. However, the high value associated with certifications also makes them a target for fraudulent activities such as:

• Forgery of certificates to falsely claim compliance.
• Misuse of expired certificates to cover lapses in standards.
• Use of certificates beyond their scope, such as for unapproved facilities or products.
• Logo Misuse: Logos of certifying bodies are used without authorization, creating an illusion of legitimacy.

These fraudulent practices undermine trust and can have ripple effects throughout the supply chain, leading to financial losses, reputational damage, and regulatory non-compliance. As supply chains continue to grow in complexity, the need for robust mechanisms to authenticate certifications and detect misuse becomes increasingly urgent.

However, digital certificate authentication is associated with a number of inherent challenges.

• Digital certificates vary widely in terms of format and content structure, making a one-size-fits-all validation process nearly impossible.
• Certificates may exist in multiple forms — scanned images, readable text, or hybrids — which require different techniques to analyze.
• The same certificate can sometimes differ between the one provided by the holder and the issuer’s online database, further complicating verification.

The Solution

Different facets of modern AI technology can help deal with almost all of these challenges.

1. Diverse Certificate Formats

Certificates exist in varying formats, including plain text, scanned images, and hybrid forms that combine text and visual elements. Application of a blend of different AI techniques can enable accurate information extraction from these files.

2. Fraudulent Modifications

Forgery or misuse of certificates often involves tampering with the content, such as altering validity dates or misrepresenting scope. This too can be attacked with the capabilities of modern AI.

3. Certificate Applicability

Certificates are often issued for specific batches, facilities, or products, creating challenges when verifying compliance in complex supply chains where batches are split, aggregated, or transformed.

4. Scalability and Adaptability

Manual verification is time-consuming and impractical for large-scale supply chains involving numerous certificates across different regions.

— — — — — — An example for a Transaction Certificate — — — — — — — — —

How TilliT Implements These AI Solutions

TilliT leverages multiple AI technologies to provide an all-inclusive solution for the certificate authentication problem. Following is a summary.

TilliT is Adaptable to Any Certificate Format

Whether the certificate is text-based, image-based, or a hybrid, TilliT efficiently extracts and standardizes key information using OCR and NLP (including powerful Large Language Models), ensuring no detail is missed. Using a proprietary domain model, it maps information into objects, properties, relationships and constraints. This model shapes the extracted data in a way which is ideal for further processing.

Fraud Detection at a whole new level

TilliT combines image engineering and data validation to verify the authenticity of both visual elements (e.g., logos, stamps) and textual data. By cross-referencing certificates with trusted online databases, it eliminates the guesswork involved in identifying tampered or forged certificates.

A fully fledged Batch Tracking Solution

TilliT’s batch tracking algorithms trace product batches through splits, aggregations, and transformations; the three types of changes the batches in supply chains undergo. This ensures that the validity of a certificate can be reliably linked back to its original scope, even in the most complex scenarios.

Fast and Scalable Verification

TilliT processes large volumes of certificates quickly and accurately. Its confidence scoring system consolidates multiple AI-driven checks, providing users with actionable insights into certificate authenticity.

Following is a screenshot from TilliT, showing some of the steps involved in the certificate authentication process.

TilliT’s approach is not about replacing the existing processes but enhancing them with precision and scalability. By focusing on adaptability, trust, and efficiency, it bridges the gap between supply chain complexity and the need for reliable, data-driven compliance verification.