After spending weeks planning the manufacture of our product, completing all necessary quality inspections and with a great deal of skill, care and attention got the perfect product ready for delivery. But in the final few hours before the product is sold, we lose control and end up spoiling or losing the product that we spent weeks creating.
Tracking and tracing products is nothing new. We can all order a product from Amazon Prime and see exactly where the delivery is or check how far away our Uber driver is just by using a mobile phone App.
For many years we have had intelligent plants which provide us with mountains of data to analyse and refine our manufacturing processes ad infinitum to ensure we operate as lean as possible, with minimum waste.
Using the Design Thinking methodology we can enable the existing indoor tracking capabilities into the logistics side of your supply chain operations. Whether this is detecting the opening of a vehicle back door at an unexpected location or monitoring the conditions inside a temperature-controlled vehicle to maintain the quality of your product, we bring all this information into your decision-making processes using the SAP Cloud Platform.
As an example, we have produced a batch of product carefully over a number of weeks and now handed this to our 3PL carrier having first attached a returnable tracker onto the pallet. We can now locate the pallet using the GPS data being transferred back from the device.
We can also monitor any critical parameters, either from the vehicle telematics (where available) or directly from our device. In this example, we are monitoring the temperature of the goods to prevent spoilage during transport. As soon as the temperature reaches the first threshold set, the Logistics Controller is immediately notified.
Important for each notification are the approved options for what action should be taken next. In our example we might want to schedule an additional inspection at the 3PL warehouse, restricting the status of the batch until the checks are complete.
Alternatively, we could send a request to the driver to return the delivery while we immediately arrange a replacement one, thus ensuring the best possible service for our customer.
It is often too late to wait until the delivery arrives at its next destination before taking the corrective action needed to resolve the issue. Therefore, identifying the issue while the product is still in transit is a critical part of making decisions in the correct time frame to minimise the impact of these unplanned events.
Naturally being a cloud based solution, all of these monitors can be used on mobile devices so all notifications can be viewed and actions taken even when away from your desktop. The data captured can also be analysed to provide improvements in your logistics processes.
The SCP framework allows for the monitoring of any data object e.g. pressure, temperature, humidity, speed, motion, doors opening etc which ultimately provide the same insights outside the factory gates that we have all enjoyed for many years inside our factories. For example, this could be used to alert the control tower if a vehicle door is opened at a location not linked to a customer delivery point or if there is motion detected in the back of the vehicle during transit.
Do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to know more about our Supply Chain Control Tower capabilities or the Design Thinking Methodology used to develop this.
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