By P Sreenivasa Gopal
Hyper connectivity is something that connects persons and things - anytime, anywhere. This will have an impact on our social, political and economic consequence and plays a major part in our day-to-day lives. This hyper connectivity is also known as IoT (Internet of Things), the new buzz word in the industry.
Logistics Ecosystem
Visibility in transit is one of the key problem areas in logistics. The logistics ecosystem has various players. Products are handled and moved between manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, retailers and customers. IoT, with cloud based GPS, helps in tracking items and their statuses. This technology uses RFID chips to communicate with each other. Chips will be attached to items and using this, items can send information like their identity, their location, temperature, pressure etc. This also prevents goods from getting damaged as chips can send out information in case of bad weather conditions like varying temperature and humidity or traffic conditions, driver specific data like (driving patterns, average speed, etc.) during transit.
Data gathered and stored from GPS and RFID based technologies helps professionals to automate shipping and delivery process by predicting the exact time of arrival. Combination of real-time sensor data with environmental data will provide higher order of intelligence to all the relevant stakeholders. This allows the stakeholders to make efficient decisions to improve the overall productivity.
For example, providing information about traffic jam and the potential delay before starting of the trip has much higher value than receiving an alert if stuck in traffic due to roadblock.
IoT can help in the vehicle preventive maintenance aspect as well. If equipment can by themselves self-diagnose a potential problem, the problem can be solved much before it fails. IoT can include different elements in logistics, which are connected and having intelligence as given below:
- Vehicles - play a key role in logistics ex: - truck, planes and ships
- Sites - vehicles pass through many of these sites during their journey
- Roads - intelligence is started to build into roadways, railways, etc.
- Reducing the asset loss by knowing and resolving issues in time
- Efficient routing and saving of fuel cost
- Monitor and maintenance of temperature in transit for perishable food items
- Monitoring and tracking of inventory; reduce out-of-stock situations
- Improve fleet efficiencies by reducing redundancies
With IoT, exchange of information is seamless between various stakeholders in the supply chain. Also, this helps the users to be proactive and take preventive measures.
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