Your Shipment is Missing – Now What?
Supply chain management is a job function critical to business success. Getting the appropriate amount of finished inventory in the right places at the right time requires a careful balance between several competing needs.
The right inventory parts arrive in the right place at the right time is the cumulative result of lead time decisions, supplier choices, and requisitions made by purchasing, lot-sizing policies made and executed by production, transportation mode decisions made by logistics, customer service expectations and forecast accuracy set by marketing and sales.
But what are your options when one of these interdependent parts goes wrong, and your shipment fails to show up on time?
Reactive Troubleshooting
Most of the time, you don't know something's missing until it doesn't show up when needed, and by then, it's a real problem. From there, figuring out where the process broke down is a complicated ordeal. There's a lot of time spent trying to understand where your product is, and why it isn't where it's supposed to be. You’re stuck calling suppliers, shippers, trucking companies, customs expeditors, and delivery companies until you identify the problem—and determine a solution
Lost Productivity
This can be an expensive process, because time is lost when materials aren't on-hand when needed. Perhaps a production line shuts down for a period of time, or retail locations will be short on their inventory needs. The result in every instance is a loss of revenue, which could prove catastrophic.
Wasted Man-Hours
In addition to the loss of revenue, there's a loss in the form of employee man-hours spent troubleshooting logistics issues. Unraveling complicated shipping processes to find lost containers or trailers consumes time that should be spent on other value-adding activities.
Increased Shipping Costs
Costs also pile up when trying to solve logistics problems. When product isn't where it should be, orders are placed again, and shipping is sped up, now all in expedited form—a very expensive process that eats into margins and puts pressure on bottom line revenue.
Proactive Troubleshooting With Intelyt
Today's complicated, "omni-channel" buying environment—where retailers must have product available for buyers in increasingly disparate venues—requires businesses to be more proactive in their approach to supply chain management. With the availability of tools that can leverage Big Data technologies, logistics problems can be simplified and managed more effectively.
Our Industrial IoT technology has enabled us to provide a visible tracking solution for high-value and critical shipments in the supply chain function of any business. Our solution utilizes Intelyt iTag tracking devices, our global communications network, and secure hosted servers, to bring an unparalleled level of granularity to the shipping process.
In the past, shipment tracking was a manual process that was dependent on people logging shipment progress as it reached or left key milestone points in transportation. But what happens when that process gets messed up? We've all seen it happen—we're expecting a package, and it seems to disappear from the system, with no real answers.
Without good data, the shipper really has no idea where it is. That means it needs to be shipped again, only faster—and at a higher cost. That might not matter when you're talking about a pair of shoes, but how about when you're talking about a crate of critical parts needed for final assembly of the super-widget that your company is counting on to drive revenue in the coming years?
Intelyt’s solutions allow real time tracking for any shipment, or any carton within a shipment. If an individual carton is separated from the rest, an immediate alert is sent that is independent of your suppliers and carriers, and a crisis can be averted. Our solution gives you the peace of mind that your critical assets are where they're supposed to be.