There is an argument, gathering popularity, that the IoT market has grown up; that IoT just works, well enough, at last – so that technology is no longer the start-point for a conversation with industry about digital change. Instead, a linear narrative can now be plotted, quite easily, between a business problem and a business outcome – without being forced to make the kinds of technical detours or digital diversions that overwhelm the whole story, and make it lose focus.
More than this, there is a realisation that IoT is only a part of the solution, and neither the start of it (probably), nor the whole of it (certainly). Chatting with leading IoT outfit Roambee for a new editorial report on IoT tracking in the supply chain – how IoT grew up and got real, in the hardest industry of them all; out next week – these rumours and suspicions appear to be confirmed. Sanjay Sharma, chief executive at the company, reckons IoT is a different game in the ‘new-normal’.
He says: “I have been on the road lately, meeting customers in every region, and the thing that has changed over the last year is the maturity in the market – among both customers and service providers. Because 12 months ago, the idea was, ‘Here is an IoT device, to stick on a shipment, to track it from A to B’. Those days are gone; the pressure from Covid, and the funding and hunger to advance the supply chain, has given way to something bigger.”
Sharma – supply-chain transparency to autonomy
This is a snapshot of the interview; more will appear in the upcoming report. But the point for Sharma, like for others, is that enterprises are no longer looking at IoT as a quick fix. They don’t want a quick fix, he says; they want complete control and total change. “Track-and-trace makes supply chains transparent, but the goal – the ultimate outcome – is to deliver autonomy and sustainability in the supply chain,” he comments.
It is like the enterprise market – or some scale-driving parts of it, anyway – have got a taste of IoT, because of a post-pandemic impulse to reduce costs and optimise logistics, and discovered it liked the flavour. But instead of just ordering more of the same, this sensory awakening has set it on a richer journey, to mix tastes and aromas – to dine out on data, properly, and change its whole diet, actually. Or so the story goes, as told by the whole industry (see report).
Sharma says: “IoT for track-and-trace has shifted up a gear, basically, to be IoT for intelligence. Twelve months ago, it was being used to light up the supply chain, to identify glitches in it. Now the supply chain is all lit-up, all the glitches are known, and all the improvements are being made; instead, the question is how else that IoT data and supply-chain data can be used to optimise a logistics network.”
He references UK retail giant Tesco, which has an extended partnership with Direct Rail Services (DRS), the general cargo rail division of Nuclear Transport Solutions, to run supermarket supplies around the country on intermodal trains, and to reduce its reliance on road freight – at a time, post-coronavirus (and mid-geopolitical unrest and environmental angst), when fuel prices are high, traffic is busy, and delivery schedules are being missed.
“With Tesco, every time there was an out-of-stock, it would just send a truck to the store. But post-covid, the fuel has gone up and the roads are busier – so it is expensive, bad for the environment, and hard to predict. So it has figured out the only way to replenish items predictably is to move them on rail cars – on a truck from a central warehouse, onto a rail box on a train to the local station, and back on a truck to the store,” he says.
Is Roambee supplying the rail trackers and data aggregation into the bargain? Sharma is not saying; it is an illustrative example, he says. “It will be extracting telematics from its truck fleet, either side, and putting IoT on the rail cars, to see where the goods are, and any risks to the timetable. The thing is to extract the data from all different systems, and make it available in a single pane of glass. It has brought predictability and sustainability back to its supply chain, and reduced the cost as well.”
Sounds like a Roambee deal, but he still won’t say. At the same time, it is presumably also an example of day-three digital-change for a supply-chain company, according to Sharma’s own neat five-step plan for transformation – which is what Roambee sells to enterprises, and which further underlining the argument that the IoT discourse has changed over 12 months. “If we go to a customer and talk about AI and ML, and digital twins, the customer just gets worried – because these are big buzzwords, and they sound expensive. So we take them on a journey.”
The idea is they will be changed on-arrival – transmogrified, as Calvin would have it, with total visibility of their supply chain, covering these twin disciplines of traceability and transparency, bringing not just enlightenment, but reinvention, as well, perhaps. So the story goes. But it is Sharma’s, and so we hand over to him; the rest is his travel monologue, about five days on the road to digital change, to borrow a line from an old truck driving song. (Note, there is more explanation of the value-return at each stage in the report.) Sharma says…
“So, day one: we give them as many trackers as they want, to put on any and all of their shipments, to light up their supply chain and identify glitches – on the road, in the warehouse, or in the store. And they are enjoying this track-and-trace system, to the point they are scaling to more lanes, more shipments, more destinations. But they are also getting all these alerts and notifications about what’s going wrong, and some are false positives.
“So they ask for the five key problem-alerts, instead of all 5,000, and we turn on our ML engine to filter the ones that matter. And that’s day two. Day three: the customer says, ‘This is great, on its own, but can you integrate with my backend transport system and my backend warehouse system?’ So we offer an easy plugin, and within days all of that is combined; and that integration gives them a frictionless, very automated visibility platform.
“So they get to a point where they are ready to start optimising. Day four of the journey: we provide patterns-of-behaviour in the supply chain. Maybe they want to rate their transport providers and transport routes – to know which are most effective, and their risk impact on spoilage and damage. And they love that everything is humming, but they want to deliver the data to their control tower [dashboard].
“And that is day five – so folks can start taking real time decisions across the wider supply chain. That is how we describe the process to customers, and some go one-to-five very quickly, in less than a year, and some take time to bring improvements at every stage.”
