Chapter 1: The Problem
Every manufactured product carries a trail of documents. A battery housing needs a material certificate from its alloy supplier. The component maker creates assembly specs and quality records. An independent lab issues a test report. The car maker at the end needs all of it for regulatory compliance.
Today, most of this travels by email. PDFs get attached, forwarded, renamed, and filed into folders that quickly become outdated. When a supplier updates a certificate, they email it again — to a different list. Some recipients get the update; others keep using last year's version.
Larger companies build portals. But every customer has a different portal. A mid-size supplier with forty customers manages forty logins and forty upload processes. Some companies invest in direct API integrations. These work until one side changes their API. Then someone spends weeks fixing it.
The pattern:
- Every new partner means a new integration
- Each relationship has its own format and access model
- No way to verify authenticity at scale
- Documents expire and get replaced — nobody downstream finds out until something breaks
What would have to change
The problem isn't the documents themselves. It's how they move between companies. A solution would need to replace one-to-one connections with a shared protocol — a common way to publish, discover, negotiate access, and transfer data that works the same regardless of who the partner is.
That's what a dataspace provides. The rest of this guide shows how.
Next: The Companies