Continuously Connected
Global Supply Chains

The opportunity to optimise
the supply chain

Despite the incredible sophistication of global supply chains, billions of dollars of food, fuel, medicines, and goods are thought to be lost every year. Criminal gangs siphon off valuable products or slip fraudulent products through weak links in the chain. Perishable goods end up in the wrong place or are thrown away because they are believed (sometimes mistakenly) to have breached temperature thresholds in transit.

In theory, this set of problems could be solved with a single solution: monitor individual goods in real-time from the moment they leave the factory to the moment they are delivered to the customer.

This would allow intervention the moment an item drifted off course, accurate assessments of the condition of goods arriving, and opportunities to identify data-driven improvements. Given the size of the prize, many companies have been experimenting with ways to do this. Successes have been achieved in some parts of some supply chains, but not to the granularity of individual goods, or even packages of goods. Tracking a container is helpful but won’t tell you that one box inside the container has split and is gaining temperature. Trials looking at this have so far come up short of a truly global solution.

On this page, we will look at the opportunities created by continuous monitoring, the barriers to achieving them, and how we can overcome them in the short and long term.

The global opportunity from
connected supply chain

Before we look at how to deliver connected supply chains, let’s consider what that opportunity is.

BCG estimates that 1.6 billion tons of food, worth about 1.2 trillion, are lost or go to waste every year, with half due to loss, damaged, theft or spoiling (the rest is overproduction). Much could be eliminated with real-time monitoring.

Fewer lost and stolen goods
Mix-ups are surprisingly common. For example, after finding that 15% of its roll cages weren’t returned, a major UK food retailer ran a trial to connect them and see where they went. Many ended up in competitors’ car parks. Some ended up in Europe. It illustrates just how easy it is for goods to become mixed up as they move through supply chains.

There are plenty of anecdotes about UK supermarkets receiving the wrong deliveries, including one last Christmas of turkeys delivered to the wrong store, which could not be rectified before they all went off, ruining many Christmases.

This must be happening all the time. Some may be mix-ups or carelessness. Some may be criminal activity. With connectivity and data, we can know exactly what’s happening and take corrective measures – whether rapid responses or systemic changes.

Example
A major beer manufacturer provides dedicated beer taps to landlords around the world. When landlords switch provider, as they do regularly, they are supposed to send the taps back. But many don’t, and a third simply disappear. Because they are all the same, it is hard to track who has what. This company is now looking at installing a low-cost connectivity solution to give oversight of where its products are in the world so they can reduce wastage and costs.

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Less waste
In many cases, food and medicine packages must be kept under the right temperature conditions (the cold chain) or they will spoil. With data, we can spot the points where problems occur and improve the systems causing waste.

We can also make more informed decisions. A vaccine shipment that arrives with evidence of tampering will need to be thrown away. But if the recipient can check the data and see it was only part of a careful professional inspection, and done within safe parameters, they can still use it.

It also provides an audit of where things have been. Food recalls happen when a point in the supply chain reports a potential contamination and can cost millions of dollars. Oversight may allow decoupling of different batches, and reduce the need for recalls.

Example
A major gas supplier sells medical gases to hospitals. The delivery driver stacks them upright for the hospital. When they are used, empties are laid on their sides. Drivers often drive to the hospital to check how many are left. They are looking at integrating connected sensors onto the cylinders, which can provide real-time updates and save their drivers time and fuel, better align deliveries to customer needs, and track containers throughout the system to minimize loss.

Tackling Fraud
Supply chain complexity creates openings for counterfeit products to slip in. An investigation by the University of Manchester found complex networks of contracting and subcontracting logistics behind the trade in illicit alcohol. The UK’s HMRC estimates that £1.2 billion is lost every year in avoided taxes.

A data blind spot at a handover point creates opportunities for swapping in counterfeit goods. Continuous real-time monitoring would make this much harder.

New business opportunities
For logistics companies that support supply chains, connectivity can also allow a new differentiated offer. By connecting their containers, they can sell their customers valuable data-driven insights and move to differentiated ‘as-a-service’ payment models that link payments to value delivered, rather than units delivered.

Example
A company which leases millions of industrial chemical containers has turned them into connected devices, so they can offer a differentiated service. They can also offer valuable monitoring solutions, and avoid charging customers for lost containers, helping them reduce costs.

Why connected supply chains
are so hard to get right

Such a major opportunity would seem a problem worth solving. And indeed, it has focused many minds. But solutions have been hard to find.

Two obvious challenges need to be overcome: designing connectivity solutions that will work continuously throughout a product’s global journey and getting cost low enough to track the low-value products that make up much of the supply chain.

Connectivity challenges
To track a batch through its journey, a connected monitoring device needs to be fitted to an enclosed ‘container’ (e.g. a box, roll cage, or pallet). This device will need sensors that provide data about the state of those goods, such as temperature, tilt, or tamper. It will also need connectivity that will be able to transmit this data to the cloud, wherever it is in the world. Many attempts to solve the connectivity challenge have failed to deliver.

Whatever communications standard you use, you will need to transmit data via mobile networks to continuously track products that move around the world. Solutions that rely on fixed connectivity (e.g. factory Wi-Fi) will only work in certain locations. Dedicated satellite tracking is not likely to be cost-effective anytime soon.

This means the device must have connectivity that will switch between multiple networks as it moves between them. Lots of companies claim to offer roaming SIMs that can do this, but most are designed to connect in the cheapest way, not the best. This means they often don’t find networks, leaving big blind spots on the journey.

This is made more challenging by permanent roaming issues. A growing number of national networks are clamping down on excessive roaming. You don’t want your pallet of goods to find itself traveling through Brazil, having used up its roaming allowance and unable to connect. So connectivity needs to work with any network it may come across, on that network’s terms.

Finally, there is the device design. Network issues commonly kick SIMs off the network. If the device isn’t designed to spot when this happens and quickly recover, connectivity can be lost for the rest of the journey.

All of this must be solved in a way that doesn’t create complexity. Warehouse managers don’t want complex setups and troubleshooting. The device needs to be a single stock-keeping unit (SKU) to drop into the roll cage, pallet, or trailer to aid operational efficiency and global deployments, and just work.

Whatever communications standard you use, you will need to transmit data via mobile networks to continuously track products that move around the world."

How Eseye solves the connectivity challenge

Eseye’s AnyNet+ eSIM can detect and connect to the most available mobile network, and immediately switch networks if the connection drops or the environment changes. It delivers continuous connectivity without dropping because our networking infrastructure is designed to provide highly available services.

This is true anywhere in the world, thanks to our relationships with over 700 mobile networks, including in countries with roaming limits. A single design, with a single transparent bill, can be deployed regardless of where it will travel.

Finally, our consulting team can guide customers through design decisions, from circuitry and component selection, to planning for new technologies such as 5G, to device testing and simulating challenging network conditions around the world. All of which ensures that once the monitoring device is created, it will be ready to work, out of the box, continuously, anywhere in the world.