Supply Chain Monitoring: Returnable Container tracking
Background
A manufacturer of highly explosive chemicals needs to account for every gallon of chemical whether it’s in process, storage, or shipment to or from a customer.
Situation
ens of thousands of metal containers ranging in size from 50 to 300 gallons are either in process, storage, or being shipped around the globe. Not knowing exactly what state or where the containers were posed a triple threat:
- Safety for the workers handling these containers without an awareness of the processing state.
- Exposure to regulatory compliance violations for lax safety and auditable history of a container’s state.
- Revenue and operational opportunity costs incurred due to demand planning bottlenecks aggravated by poor visibility to the container’s processing and supply chain cycles. For instance, inability to provide the customer an accurate timeline from order to shipment or utilize FIFO to fulfill the demand pipeline or ordering expensive specialized containers to fulfill new demand due to lack of visibility of inventory.
The Solution
Passive RFID ATEC certified gateways designed specifically to work on metal are installed throughout the warehouse. All 40,000 containers get an ATEC certified sensor. The movement of containers in and out or within the factories or warehouses are constantly scanned or read and fed through the gateways to the iVEDiX platform. The platform streams in the data, aggregates, maps and renders the information over intuitive, digitally enhanced, geofenced blueprints of the site in real time.
If it moves, we know. Every container is tagged and tracked throughout its lifecycle of being cleaned, filled, shipped, returned, and refilled. Exceptions associated with every step like dwell time violations skipped steps or expired certifications are triggers for varying levels of alerts and multi-channel notifications on mobile or desktop, from critical to informational. All events, alerts, and actions are logged providing a transparent and auditable record for on-demand compliance. 3rd Party integrations including WMS systems are also in place to keep other systems synchronized with both metadata and asset activity. The platform is highly configurable and designed to evolve with the business, processes, and/or rules.
Highlights
- Locate Assets in Real-Time
- Improved people safety and asset security
- On-demand data for compliance and audit
- Globally deployed and scalable.
- Real-time, profile-based multi-channel notifications.
- Robust data visualization and analytics serving up actionable intelligence
- Process flow improvement and cycle time savings
- Seamless integration with SAP
- Customized modules for specialized processes
- The intuitive interface on mobile and desktop
