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Warehouse Drones: Real-Time Inventory Tracking by Air

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Using the Right Technology For Your Inventory Management

Using the Right Technology For Your Inventory Management

Warehouse Drones for Inventory Identification

Accurate and reliable data is essential to efficient and effective business operations.

Inventory management represents a significant portion of assets in a business.

Therefore, managers and other decision-makers need to accurately and timely know how much inventory there is and where it is located in order to make effective budgeting, operating, and financial decisions.

Companies that carry a significant amount of inventory are continually looking for innovative logistics solutions to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of their inventory checking process.

While some companies stop operations to carry out a full physical inventory check, others perform more targeted checks, with cycle counts in areas that deal with high-value or high-volume products.

Regardless of your approach, it often means that there is a team of individuals roaming the warehouse manually checking for inventory.

This can be time-consuming, expensive, disruptive, require equipment (people lifts), and exposes people to safety risks.

Most important of all, inventory accuracy is never guaranteed due to the verification process being manual, coupled with the time taken to execute.

Inventory Robotics: Automated Cycle Counting

Automatic identification and location of hard-to-reach inventory in warehouses

PINC’s UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) is called PINC AIR, Aerial Inventory Robots™.

This warehouse drone solution allows companies to apply drone technology, coupled with advanced optical, RFID, and barcoding sensor capabilities, to significantly improve the operational effectiveness and efficiency of warehouse inventory cycle count.

The warehouse drone can be ordered by the operator to perform automatic inventory checks throughout the facility, accurately identifying inventory in put-away locations, at the frequency of your choosing.

Moving the process of information capture into the air provides on-demand checks of logistics inventories and avoids the time, expense, and risk of using a people lift to access difficult to reach locations within the warehouse.

Using extensive optical sensors, the inventory drone can navigate, identify inventory, determine inventory location, and fly safely in a warehouse environment.

The power in the drone inventory management solution lies within the sophisticated software capabilities that provide three-dimensional mapping, navigation, inventory identification, and location accuracy. Indoor flights do not require FAA approval.

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Using Blockchain to Secure the Medical Supply Chain

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Imperial Logistics leverages One Network’s Real Time Value Network cloud solution to manage the entire distribution process and help ensure the delivery of clean drugs to patients using Blockchain.

One Network Enterprises, the global provider of multi-party digital network platform and services, has announced that leading logistics provider Imperial Logistics is using One Network’s cloud platform to provide an end-to-end fulfillment backbone that manages the entire distribution process of essential medical supplies.

The solution includes serialization and authentication of critical drugs such as antimalarial medications.

By establishing One Network’s Real Time Value Network™ (RTVN) and serialization and tracking solutions for country-wide fulfillment, Imperial Logistics is safeguarding the distribution of medication.

The solutions enable Imperial Logistics to increase visibility and security throughout the global pharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chain process.

“Counterfeit or contaminated medication that contains the wrong or no active ingredients has long plagued the global, pharmaceutical supply chain. New regulations are coming into effect around the globe and mandates such as mass serialization and ‘track-and-trace’ are quickly becoming the worldwide standard for regulators,” said Dr. Iain Barton, Healthcare Strategy Executive at Imperial Logistics.

RTVN’s chain-of-custody and serialization authentication capabilities enable Imperial Logistics to track the control, transfer, management, and distribution of antiretroviral and antimalarial medication and supplies in real time, as they flow throughout the supply chain all the way to the individual patient.

The solution will also be used to comply with incoming national regulations in South Africa and other countries.

Read more at Using Blockchain to Secure the Medical Supply Chain

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ONE Blockchain Platform to Provide Enhanced Transparency and Security for Supply Chains

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One Network Enterprises, the global provider of a multi-party digital network platform, today announced a new, flexible and cross-industry Chain-of-Custody solution built on its Real Time Value Network (RTVN).

By providing serialization and tracking across complex supply chains that involve multiple parties and hand-offs, this latest offering leverages the powerful capabilities of Blockchain to help mitigate threats such as product diversion, counterfeiting, grey market distribution, spoilage, substandard products, and unauthorized introductions.

“The global implications of substandard, falsified, and counterfeit and substandard products are huge,” said Ranjit Notani, CTO of One Network.

“While some of the compromises in traditional Blockchain solutions must make the difficult choice between confidentiality, single-version-of-the-truth, and a lack of scalability, ONE Blockchain is fully integrated into One Network’s global fulfillment backbone offering a completely secure application with fine-grained confidentiality at all levels, while maintaining a single, trusted record for every transaction without requiring any expensive integration into supply chain operations.”

The new Chain-of-Custody solution was developed to deal with the realities of today’s supply chains where end-to-end serialization – from raw materials to consumers and beyond – is not an all or nothing proposition.

Accordingly, the solution is designed to increase the lengths of chain-of-custody segments until the segments merge to form a full end-to-end secure chain.

The Chain-of-Custody solution supports serial tracking, lot tracking, hybrid tracking, lot splitting, tracking through consolidation and deconsolidation, tracking through blending and discrete mixing, hierarchical IoT operations, partial chains-of-custody, and targeted recalls.

Read more at ONE Blockchain Platform to Provide Enhanced Transparency and Security for Supply Chains

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Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility & Connectivity

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Through the rich integration of experienced supply chain professionals, world class technology, and customer insights, C.H. Robinson is reinventing global supply chains by making them more prescriptive, automated and efficient.

Navisphere Vision continues to advance the powerful and proven capabilities of C.H. Robinson’s proprietary Navisphere technology platform.

Microsoft, an innovator in fulfillment and logistics capabilities and a customer of C.H. Robinson’s TMC division, has been using Navisphere Vision since its alpha release in 2016.

“Navisphere Vision helps us understand the things that we couldn’t before. It provides the visualization that connects data and the real-time events that are happening within our supply chain,” said Alaina Hawkins, senior manager of global logistics at Microsoft.

“Navisphere Vision helps us make decisions on a more precise, real-time level so we can address any challenges that might occur, react in a less randomized fashion, create predictability throughout our supply chain, and increase collaboration so we can deliver our products to customers on time. It’s tremendously powerful.”

In addition to providing real-time visibility down to an SKU level, Navisphere Vision delivers insights and impacts of potential disruptions from weather, traffic or current events, as well as predictive analytics to help shippers make better, faster decisions.

Read more at Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility & Connectivity

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How Does Big Data Analytics Help in Decision Making

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Staying ahead in the game is paramount for any business organization to survive in this competitive world. The future poses challenges that need tackling in the present. Every decision made today has a significant impact on the future of that organization. The rate at which a company responds to challenges in the present and the future is what determines their rate of success. Data Science and Big Data analytics can help organizations in decision making and drive the company to a realistic future.

The Deciding Factor

It is paramount for businesses to understand the big data concept and how it impacts the organization activities. Discussed below are ways in which Big Data facilitates faster and better decision making;

Accelerating Time-to-Answer

The time cycle for decision making is decreasing rapidly. Companies have to make decisions more quickly in this period than in the past. Accelerating decision-making time is crucial for the success of any organization. The use of Big Data doesn’t change the urgency of decision making. Big Data analytics mitigates.

Customer reaction to a product is an important factor to consider when making a decision. Using data resources to understand the preferences of customers is one way of pointing out gaps existing in the market. However, the problem is how do you integrate and act in real time? The key is to know how to combine Big Data with your traditional Business Intelligence to create a more convenient data ecosystem that allows for the generation of new insights while executing your present plans.

Accelerating your time-to-answer is crucial for customer satisfaction. For example, if your answer time is usually in minutes, Big Data can reduce it to seconds. If it takes weeks for a client to have their problem tackled, then reducing it to days is more convenient for your customers. Customer retention is critical to the success of your organization.

Read more at How Does Big Data Analytics Help in Decision Making

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4 ways retailers can improve supply chain management

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Retailers and their suppliers are under more pressure than ever before to deliver more goods to more destinations faster.

To stay competitive, “retailers need to know where things are at all times so they can redirect shipments, rebalance inventories and respond to new demands on the fly,” says Rich Becks, general manager, Industry Value Chains, E2open, which delivers cloud-based supply chain collaboration solutions.

And if there is a problem with their supply chain, and they can’t get products to stores and/or consumers, retailers (and their suppliers) risk losing customers.

So what steps can, and should, retailers take to make sure their supply chain operations are running smoothly? Following are four suggestions from retail supply chain experts.

1. Use cloud-based software that can track and manage inventory in real time.

“Retailers struggle to balance uncertain consumer behavior and long, complex supply chains,” explains Kurt Cavano, vice chairman & CSO, GT Nexus, a supply chain technology company.

2. Use source tagging and RFID to keep track of inventory and stock levels.

“To improve supply chain management from the moment product leaves the manufacturer’s warehouse all the way through to the point-of-purchase, retailers should deploy a source tagging solution,” says Steve Sell, director, North America Marketing, Retail Practice, Tyco Integrated Security.

3. Become a part of a B2B e-procurement network.

“B2B [or e-procurement] networks can help companies predict supply chain disruptions and act quickly to adapt business processes,” says Sundar Kamakshisundaram, vice president, Procurement and Business Network Solutions, Ariba, an SAP company.

4. Make sure your marketing and supply chain teams are in sync.

“When executing a promotion, a lot of retailers overlook the alignment of the supply chain and marketing teams, which is crucial [if you want] to successfully launch a promotion,” says Pat Sullivan, senior vice president, Promotions Management, HAVI Global Solutions, a consulting company.

Read more at 4 ways retailers can improve supply chain management

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