Supply Chain Logistics

Eliminate visibility black spots for a more efficient and secure supply chain with increased productivity and reduced costs.

Are you trying to manage multiple global supply chains with outmoded technology or manual processes? Is lack of supply chain visibility leading to unnecessary maintenance, recovery, redirection, and replacement costs?

Product innovation is no longer sufficient as a competitive differentiator, to really stand out and meet your profitability goals you need to create an efficient supply chain that securely delivers these goods to your customers on time, in perfect condition.

Smarter Technologies Group’s Orion Data Network asset tracking, monitoring and recovery solutions help you enhance your supply chain, streamlining your internal development, production and transport operations while also creating customised, innovative and cost-effective delivery solutions for your customers. The result is a better customer experience that gives you excellent customer retention and boosts your brand reputation.

Global Supply Chain & Logistics Opportunities & Challenges

Globalisation offers a wealth of business opportunities, but on the flip side it presents new challenges as clients in different countries have varying expectations and demands regarding the sourcing, pricing, delivery, reporting and invoicing services you provide. The longer the global supply chain, the bigger the risks and the more difficult they are to predict. Maintaining visibility over your assets becomes increasingly hard when you’re dealing with multiple carriers, external logistics providers, and different modes of transport over land and sea. There is also the issue of complying with different international regulations, taxation and business cultures.

Automation & Optimisation

Optimising and automating your supply chain by tracking your assets and your key personal gives you control, transparency, flexibility and scalability while enabling you to meet health and safety requirements and quality, environmental and financial Regulations. Collecting accurate real-time data on the location, temperature, condition and safety of your assets means you can share that data across your business to enable identification of bottlenecks, demand planning, better inventory management, predictive maintenance, higher productivity from employees and partners, theft prevention, route efficiency and faster delivery.

360° Supply Chain Visibility

Bottlenecks and Flow

Visibility over the flow of all the assets in your supply chain will show you where the bottlenecks are and which areas are diminishing your profits. The turnaround at your site may be too slow. You may be utilising several times the number of spare parts that you need. Your drivers may be using optimal routes in terms of mileage and traffic, but are they the best routes to optimise your assets?

Are Your Delivery Routes Damaging Your Profits?

For example, if your drivers are delivering full pallets or containers they are most likely to collect empty ones at their final stop, as they’ll have room on the truck without having to unload the full containers. If they always take the same route because it’s the shortest and fastest, then there will be several other drop-off points that are experiencing a build-up of empty containers that get forgotten, lost or damaged.

Initially this may appear to be a minimal financial loss. However, over time, when you start to purchase additional pallets, not realising that you already have these assets available at blind spots in your supply chain, the losses can be huge.

Total Visibility with the Orion Data Network

Smarter Technologies Group’s Orion Data Network supply chain and logistics solutions track and monitor your assets, vehicles and personnel in real time, giving you total visibility over your logistics and supply chain.

Once you see where the bottlenecks are, you can change your delivery strategy and schedule some sub-optimal routes in terms of distance or time, that will be optimal in terms of recovering your lost containers and pallets.

Financial Benefits Throughout the Whole Supply Chain

The financial benefits of recovering lost pallets go far beyond the cost of the containers themselves. In the aerospace sector, for example, servicing aeroplane engines is very cost-intensive. Usually the purchase of equipment and the requisite numbers of spares is based on estimated usage, but over a twenty-year period, there can be huge variation between planned and actual usage. One of the key drivers in any supply chain is the turnaround time of components. If the turnaround time for engine maintenance is slow due to invisible bottlenecks in your supply chain, clients will either need to purchase additional spares or entire aeroplanes, or risk causing downtime in their operational schedules.

Using Smarter Technologies asset tracking and monitoring solutions you can highlight how long engines (and other assets) are sat idle at a suppliers’ premises and not being worked upon. This gives you a view on whether it is possible to reduce the turnaround time and how to do it. This simple change can halve the number of engines required, saving a huge amount of money and increasing operability.

Customer Experience

So, the benefits of this increased visibility and asset optimisation are not just financial. Better container availability means you can transport more spare parts and speed up your supply chain to carry out maintenance and get finished products out to clients faster. This means you are able to provide your clients and partners with an improved service that gives you a competitive advantage and protects your excellent brand reputation.

Business Intelligence for Better Decision-Making

Smarter Technologies Group’s supply chain and logistics solutions use IoT and M2M technology to connect key assets like your vehicles, equipment, products, cargo, devices and personnel. Customisable data sets, real-time feedback and personalised reporting, allow you to make faster, better-informed business decisions that mitigate risk, improve your bottom line and allow you to create new revenue streams. Recent industry research shows that cutting-edge asset tracking technologies could boost the global supply chain and logistics sector by around $1.9 trillion dollars over the next decade.

Orion Data Network for the Supply Chain

The Orion Data Network is a system of tags and gateways combining cutting edge IoT-enabled sensors with RFID and GPS technology. It provides real-time visibility of assets and people in a way that’s very easy for clients to implement on any site. It can do this because it’s a broadcast based network as opposed to a control channel based network.

In practical terms Orion outperforms other solutions available on the market because:

It doesn’t matter how many or where the gateways are placed. Whereas with a control channel network things start to go wrong when there is too much control channel overlap.

Each transmission is heard by every gateway in range and the system can locate devices using RSSI. (Received Signal Strength Information). This also makes the system very fault tolerant. It’s also highly secure as its technology makes it resistant to cyber-hacking techniques. To enhance this capability, the tags have the ability to transmit in digital mode and also analogue mode. The analogue mode is what is used by hand held directional scanners to recover individual items that have been lost or stolen.

The majority of the client investment is in the device end; the tag. Because the tags are not listening for control channels they have a very predictable battery life, which means scheduled maintenance is reliable. In contrast, on a control channel network, battery life at the device end can vary by up to 300%, which means batteries last for very different durations in the field.

You can talk to an Smarter Technologies expert about how to optimise your supply chain by calling 0330 223 5000 or, to find out more about how Orion benefits your supply chain, click here.

Benefits of Orion for the Supply Chain

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Automate your systems and optimise your asset lifecycle for better transparency, control and scalability.

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Bridge the gap between planned and actual usage of assets.

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Collate and analyse pre-defined, real-time data about the condition and status of your assets.

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Reporting on temperature, location, status, condition, time, speed, motion, tamper, G-force, tilt, humidity and more.

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Business Intelligence data for business decisions based on insights and analysis.

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Increases internal and third-party productivity reduces turnaround time for an improved customer experience.

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Tags have multiple inputs for bespoke customisation if required. Orion is highly adaptable and can be easily integrated over an API to any of your servers

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Orion’s 256-bit encrypted network makes it one of the most secure networks in the world.

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No reliance on SIM and no ongoing associated costs.

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