Accell Reduces Supply Chain Complexities

Kinaxis Inc., an authority in driving agility for fast, confident decision-making in an unpredictable world, has announced that Accell Group has deployed Kinaxis’ RapidResponse platform, digitally transforming its supply chain, providing solutions to supply chain complexities.

Based in Heerenveen, Netherlands, Accell Group is a European market leader in e-bikes and Europe’s second largest supplier of bicycle parts and accessories. The company is leveraging RapidResponse to gain the agility and flexibility needed to react to changes in demand and disruption.

“We knew that in order to remain a market leader, we needed a supply chain that could withstand disruption and adapt to change,” said Jon San Andres, Group Planning Director at Accell. “With Kinaxis we are able to gain complete visibility into our supply chain, and better plan for any scenario.”

With Kinaxis, Accell Group has end-to-end visibility of its supply chain, and the ability to balance all aspects of the demand and supply plans instantly and continuously, taking into consideration material restrictions, production capacity and market volatility. RapidResponse provides the ability to run multiple simulations and collaborate in real-time.

“We continue to see accelerating customer growth in European markets, and we understand the unique supply chain requirements they need,” said John Sicard, Kinaxis CEO. “We are excited to continue to work with Accell Group in bringing concurrent planning to its supply chain.”

The Accell and Kinaxis teams were supported by bluecrux, a value chain consulting company, with broad business experience in successful planning transformations. Accell, Kinaxis, and bluecrux blended into one team, efficiently melting cultures and methodologies. Bluecrux took on the role to dive into the Accell business context and processes, bridging across organisation, process, RapidResponse and Accell systems. Bluecrux also supported Accell and Kinaxis in driving the data and change management streams, where high quality data sets and full user adoption are adding to the success of the project.

“Using their sound methodology on how to manage advanced planning solution implementations, bluecrux helped us taking the first step in the digitalisation of our planning processes,” San Andres said. “Bluecrux is smoothly blending their business process experience, with their understanding of RapidResponse and their overall change management expertise.”

 

C4T appoints new CEO

Customs4trade, one of Europe’s leading SaaS platforms for customs management solutions, has strengthened its management team with the appointment of Rupert Spiegelberg as its new CEO. Chief Revenue Officer Jo Buvens, ex-Salesforce and Chief Product and Technology Officer Oliver Conze, ex SAP join Spiegelberg to drive C4T management and its digital platform CAS in a new direction to accelerate growth in 2023.

Spiegelberg succeeds Pieter Haesaert, who founded C4T together with Ilse Vermeersch as a customs consultancy in 2004 before developing the CAS platform ten years later. Founders Haesaert and Vermeersch will no longer be involved in the day-to-day operational management and strategy of C4T, but remain invested in the company as shareholders together with 83North, Hi Inov, 42CAP and 10x Group. Werner Koninckx will represent the founders on the board. Werner is chairman of 3E and DeltaQ and has extensive experience in scaling SaaS businesses.

“We are extremely proud of all the C4T’ers and our partners who have been relentlessly contributing to the progress we made at C4T the last years,” Haesaert and Vermeersch said. “We thank our clients and partners for the trust they put in our hands to service them in the complex and time critical world of customs compliance. C4T is now with CAS in a fantastic position to take advantage of all the changes in the customs world that we will see in coming years.”

CEO is SaaS veteran

Spiegelberg is a 20-year veteran of SaaS (Software as a Service) scale-up businesses in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. Buvens joins him as CRO, formerly Salesforce’s Regional Vice President and Country Leader for Belgium and Luxembourg, and by Oliver Conze as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Conze has spent 15 years at SAP – most recently as the German technology giant’s Chief Product Officer for Marketing Cloud.

“C4T is leading the way in driving down costs, speeding up turnaround times for UK and European importers and exporters and simplifying the hugely complex world of online customs management,” said Spiegelberg. “In taking up the role to lead C4T’s ‘A-team’ of customs experts, I will support their tireless dedication to transform our company into a champion of the sector. We will help our customers go beyond compliance to make customs and trade a strategic component of their growth.”

C4T, whose CAS digital platform manages more than one hundred thousand customs declarations every month for major brands such as Honda, Mizuno, Agristo, and many others, and delivers to customers the benefits of the increased digitisation of the customs sector as national governments across Europe move to upgrade customs systems over the course of the next couple of years.

 

Shippeo and Everysens form strategic partnership

Shippeo, a leading provider of global and multimodal shipment visibility, has partnered with Everysens, a leader in rail and intermodal transport management systems, to enhance their multimodal transport visibility offering. Everysens will provide Shippeo with the most reliable rail ETA available on the market, based on real-time data from satellite tracking and rail operators.

The two-way partnership allows Everysens to also benefit from Shippeo’s large network of road and ocean carriers, providing high quality shipment tracking data to rail and intermodal shippers and their customers. By sharing container events for ocean shipments, as well as highly accurate and reliable road freight ETAs, Everysens can better anticipate impacts on rail logistics.

In turn, Shippeo receives a stream of rail events from Everysens, including ETAs, GPS positions and loading statuses. Everysens provides ETAs for both full trains and single wagons; a unique capability within the market. The improved visibility across all types of rail transport will be available globally for Shippeo customers. In addition, Everysens covers the full transport processes, including tendering, collaborative smart planning, freight letters and CO2 emissions.

By integrating their respective shipment ETAs, both companies are able to offer their customers improved end-to-end visibility in a single offering, creating new opportunities for supply chain convergence and benefitting shippers with a higher level of supply chain transparency and optimised logistics flows.

“As shippers face more and more supply chain challenges around the world as a result of disruptive global events, they want to know when their shipments will reach their final destination,” explains Lucien Besse, COO and Co-founder at Shippeo. “With sustainability playing an increasingly important role in transportation management, rail is becoming a popular means of intermodal transport. However, visibility over rail shipments has not been easy for shippers to achieve. The partnership between Shippeo and Everysens increases shippers’ trust in rail and multimodal deliveries, providing them with critical monitoring milestones, as well as the ability to measure and improve their processes.”

“Rail is already an important part of multimodal logistics. Effects of the EU Green Deal are quickly positioning rail further as the future of freight,” says Dr. Youness Lemrabet, CEO and Founder of Everysens. “The target is clear: 30% modal share for rail by 2030, with an estimated impact of 290 million tonnes CO2 saved. To reach this, rail needs newcomers, for whom intermodal is the primary entry point. With this partnership, we can connect the dots between rail and first- and last-mile transport modes, to make modal shift truly happen.”

 

 

Asda transforms omni-channel with Blue Yonder

Having selected Blue Yonder last year to digitally transform its end-to-end supply chain and retail operations, Asda, one of Britain’s leading retailers with a unique position in the market, is continuing its retail transformation journey with Blue Yonder by selecting Luminate Commerce solutions to modernise its order management capabilities. Asda will also partner with Bringg, a Blue Yonder technology alliance partner and the leading delivery and fulfilment cloud platform, to make each element of the supply chain seamless, connected and orchestrated.

Asda consists of supercentres, superstores, and smaller supermarkets. The retailer also runs petrol filling stations and Asda Living stores, which offer its popular George clothing and home merchandise lines. The company employs more than 140,000 colleagues serving more than 16 million customers who shop in its stores and online weekly.

With Blue Yonder’s order management (OMS) microservices, Asda will be able to:

  • Process orders faster to improve the customer experience.
  • Provide customers with real-time inventory visibility from the beginning of the shopping experience, as well as pre-sourcing fulfilment options.
  • Connect with the entire supply chain, considering the capacity to fulfil demand across any channel, at any time.
  • Provide dynamic slotting options to the end customer for both home deliveries and pickup in-store.

“Omni-channel is at the heart of our strategy and customer proposition, where we want to provide a great customer experience and a seamless user journey. We have been extremely impressed by Blue Yonder’s OMS microservices, which we will deploy across our grocery, clothing and general merchandise segments,” said Carl Dawson, chief information officer, Asda.

Blue Yonder’s flexible OMS microservices, powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, will help Asda optimise the entire click-to-deliver journey, starting with an engaging customer experience through efficient order fulfilment. With Bringg, Asda will be able to optimize its last-mile operations to deliver on-time to meet customer expectations. The combination will support Asda’s home delivery service, click and collect proposition, as well as new channels such as express commerce platforms.

“Asda is leading a game-changing retail transformation focused on customer centricity, from first to last mile,” said Gael Ramaen, vice president, commerce, Blue Yonder. “We are very excited to extend our relationship with Asda into an area where we are connecting e-commerce with a true omni-channel landscape. Our modern OMS microservices are engineered to scale, perform and operate under the highest volumes seen on the market. Our OMS microservices, SaaS native, API-first components leverage the latest technology and engineering to speed up our clients’ transformations. We believe that this will help Asda to continue to modernize its business and invest in customer proposition.”

“The challenges and complexities of faster, more convenient and on-demand order orchestration, delivery and fulfilment are grand,” said Nikolai Avrutov, vice president Alliances, Bringg. “In order to achieve game-changing capabilities on these fronts, retailers need their technology vendors to work closely together and to relentlessly raise the bar for its mutual customers through tight collaboration and strategic co-innovation. We are proud to be doing just that with Blue Yonder for Asda.”

Next-generation track-and-trace

When every shipment matters, it adds real value to have critical real-time location and environment information at immediate hand. Logistics Business Magazine’s editor Paul Hamblin meets a track-and-trace solution with a vital extra dimension.

Track and Trace technology is now firmly moving to the next level with the increasing adoption of applications that offer much more than basic location guidance. US-founded Tive is a good example, promising real-time shipment updates including such in-depth information as location, temperature, light and shock readings. That makes it a very useful resource for fresh food and beverage, pharma and critical-shipment logistics providers, where correct regulated temperature and physical stability are vital to a successful passage. The Tive logic is that with this data immediately available to carrier and shipper alike, a cargo under threat can be saved, to the benefit of all parties.

Tive’s model seems to be finding plenty of traction, with over 100 global customers including logistics giants such as DSV, and Hellmann Worldwide Logistics. It raised $12m in series A capital funding at the back end of 2020 with a second round recently raising a further $54m.

Even London’s world-renowned National Gallery uses Tive to give reassurance when dispatching and receiving priceless artworks.

Jim Waters, Vice President, Global Marketing, tells me an entertaining tale from his office in Boston, Massachusetts about the company’s genesis. In 2015, founder Krenar Komoni – a native of Kosovo but an American citizen also now based in Boston – was intrigued by the inordinate length of time his father-in-law spent all day, including over dinner with the family, on the phone calling colleagues to check the status or locations of his business shipments. Komoni began to muse on the enormous value that could be delivered to organisations and individuals if such crucial information could be sourced at the touch of a button. And that’s precisely what he has now delivered.

A Tive journey begins at the touch of a small green button, attached to playing-card sized (96mm x 58mm, depth 19mm) plastic backing. Attach the tracker, usually via 3M adhesive (though one global multimodal freight client uses magnets) to the last pallet to go in the container. Press the button and data is transmitted in real time to Tive’s global-based data management team.

Jim Waters: “There’s method in applying the technology to the rear pallet. The temperature-control unit – or reefer – is at the front, meaning that the reading being sent back covers the whole truck, not just the front, therefore providing more reliable readings.”

From that point, temperature, light, shock and humidity are all recorded at every stage of the multimodal journey (road, sea, air and rail). Temperature accuracy is guaranteed to within ±0.5°C within a range of -20 to 60°C. Location tracking is accurate to within 10m using WiFi, GPS or Mobile network with 2G (now largely a legacy system) to 5G all covered. Shock sensitivity can be traced up to 12G impact, but with sensitivity as low as 0.5G, the team can deduce a pothole in the road as equally as a calamitous drop from a high-bay shelf.

“It’s about collaboration,” says Jim Waters. “We are there to work with the carrier and their customer to help save the shipment in the event of an excursion. We can point out where a temperature threshold might have been exceeded, if only for a few moments. If a delivery of fresh grapes is rotten within two days of arrival, we can tell all parties if something happened on the journey to make that fruit rot faster than it should have.”

Critical journeys are another must-have. “I can tell you hair-raising stories about hearts, livers and kidneys left on the tarmac when they should have been on an aircraft that has just taken off without them,” he reveals.

Tive can be customised to suit customer needs – it’s available with a lithium/non-lithium battery according to customer preference, and while single-use are in operation with many clients, a multi-use version for circular logistics processes offers cost savings.

 

Racing to predict the future in transportation logistics

Steve Beda (pictured), executive vice president of customer solutions, Trax Technologies, explores the importance of embracing analytics for best-in-class operations.

Not that long ago data analytics was the purview of political wonks, dusty academics, and financial analysts crunching numbers to beat the markets. Then things changed as business leaders felt increasing pressure to find new ways to improve performance, deliver shareholder value and meet skyrocketing consumer expectations for products and services. Marketing teams seized analytics as a new, more sophisticated tool for understanding customer sentiment and predicting buying patterns, while operations leaders found ways to use production line sensors and collated data to foresee line failures and areas for improvement. Sadly, transportation logistics has been slower to adopt analytics at scale to the point where, even today, some operators continue to make potentially enormous and impactful decisions for their business based on, in some cases, little more than custom and practice and a well-trained gut. That too has to change.

It is simply not enough anymore, in the ultra-competitive world of transportation with soaring gas prices, global and real-time trucking and shipping complexities and the long shadow of pandemic supply-chain interruptions are still creating staff, capacity, and container shortages. To understand the root causes of all of this, to identify market influencers and potential problems before they bring down an entire network, global transportation executives now need access to both comprehensive data and sophisticated analytics capabilities. Embracing both will do one crucially important thing for every business: help us see the future. Or at least make data-driven decisions today that lead to efficiencies tomorrow and success for the long haul.

As we begin the process of due diligence and adoption, let’s take a look at the four core types of data analytics and just what they do for supply chain efficiency.

1. Descriptive Analytics – a Foundational Understanding

You can’t look ahead without understanding where you came from and there’s absolutely no way to improve performance without pinpointing what’s working well or identifying where problems or weaknesses may be emerging. For both of these critical performance benchmarks, we need Descriptive Analytics. This is quite simply an assessment of current state using historical data. A collection, curation, and analysis of data that shows us what happened over a period of time. The number of deliveries. Volume of goods. The number of carriers, routes, modes, and so forth.

It’s the foundational baseline on which more complex data analytics practices build insights into performance and quality of service.

2. Diagnostic Analytics – Why did that happen? What does that mean?

So we have a list of what happened. But understanding why things occurred, pinpointing the variables and influencers for more nuanced strategic learnings – that’s the role of Diagnostic Analysis. Diagnostic looks beyond baseline operational outcomes to measure performance against goals, deadlines, by mode and geographies, and many other variables. As part of this process look for three key measurement strategies:

Carrier Scorecards

Carrier scorecards are a critical and comprehensive tool for understanding why outcomes happen. For decades scorecards were inconsistent, non-standardised paperwork that captured intelligence but made it incredibly time-consuming and inefficient to analyse or draw strategic insights. Ideally shippers today should enforce the use of electronic, standardised formats with their carrier partners to make analysis consistent and meaningful. From the collection and analysis of scorecard information you should expect to rapidly understand:

  • On-time Delivery: how many packages arrived on time versus missed deadlines – and where? Which carriers? Which markets?
  • Damage Tracking: how many packages arrived broken, damaged, or otherwise contaminated, affecting replacement costs and long-term reputation?
  • Billing Accuracy: do final invoices match estimates? What is the percentage variance? Which carriers are less accurate with their billing and why?
  • Fallouts: how many loads were delivered to warehousing or other points in the network only to be returned due to limited storage and handling capacities?
  • Tender acceptance: what is the acceptance rate among carriers for contracts? If this is low, there may be a perceived problem with stated terms, compensation, or another factor that must be worked out in future negotiations.

Functional Performance Metrics

Quite simply this is the process of data collection and analysis to provide a detailed understanding across the operation. When measuring performance in this way, key indicators typically include shipping times; order accuracy (did the right product ship to the right customer at the right price?); delivery times (are there unforeseen delays between shipping and delivery?); transportation costs; warehousing costs; number of shipments; inventory accuracy and inventory turnover. There can be many other variables too, but measure against these and you’ll build a comprehensive picture of your success in the marketplace.

Cost Analysis

Lastly, how much did everything cost? Is there a discrepancy between budget and actual cost? And where is the variance?  Understanding these factors will help identify weakness in the supply chain for renewed operational improvements in the short term.

3. Predictive Analytics – the impact of external data on planning and validation

The data race is on – with all kinds being collected, curated, and analysed across industries, organisations, and businesses. As external data, beyond our logistics operations, becomes more readily available and with real-time information becoming instantly accessible, the role of analytics is rapidly becoming even more critical to day-to-day operations. In predictive analytics, analysis combines external data with owned company data to create context for how we may operate in the moment or over a period of time within geographies, modes, channels, and even by carrier. Even more significantly, predictive analytics, when employed correctly, can predict the outcome of a strategic or operational change and help validate the change prior to execution, limiting risk as much as possible. It’s important again to ensure that data content and capture quality is high to enable accurate modelling using the available data inputs and known constraints to make the most accurate and meaningful prediction.

Major measures for predictive learning include:

GPS Tracking: GPS tracking was one of the earliest data points for operational efficiency analysis and is still important. Real-time tracking of trucks, trailers, and other equipment creates a broad baseline oversight of operations. Knowing at any time where carriers and other equipment are can lead to greater efficiencies and resource optimisation. But it also enables driver and safety performance monitoring, reduces administrative time to manually check-in and monitor locations and progress, and ultimately leads to more end-to-end quality customer service.

Weather Data: Knowing when weather constraints may affect performance, cause delay or even endanger drivers or other assets can be critical, especially when dealing with global shipments across countries and regions. But weather can also impact the supply and demand balance too so planning for it is important even in the short term. Tornadoes and hurricanes, flooding, and deep freezes create massive demand for generators, water, heaters, and lumber to protect against storm damage. A surge in demand creates supply challenges, can spike prices, and have other knock-on effects down the supply chain.

Traffic Data: Look at how major coastal storms can cut off whole towns and cities, or even a major sporting event in a downtown area can cripple a traffic system for hours. Understanding traffic problems, road or modal outages, parking availability, port congestion, or volume issues is an increasingly important factor in best-in-class operations. There’s a huge industry focus happening right now on the use of AI to provide real-time route optimisation – the local, national, and global re-routing of shipments and deliveries based on changes to traffic patterns in the moment. Rightly so, using external traffic data to map clear, efficient routes or make urgent changes can save time, money and protect reputation with customers.

Predictive analysis monitors and models against all of these factors and more to create an impact analysis – what we need to know, do and change to avoid network, shipping, or delivery problems. This enables strategies and data-driven decision-making that will ultimately help reduce the negative impact of external factors beyond our control while optimising operational efficiencies to meet deadlines and stay within budget.

4. Prescriptive Analytics – where are we headed?

The ultimate goal for any best-in-class transportation logistics operation is the transition to, and full adoption, of a Logistics Control Tower strategy. A seamless collection and analysis of high-quality external and internal data collected over time, modelled and used to provide a prescriptive analysis of actions needed and changes to be made.

When the Suez Canal – the world’s largest shipment gateway – was blocked last year, the effect on the local, national and global supply chains was immediate and lasting. Often when a crisis like this occurs, the teams managing logistics just don’t have the manual capabilities to deal with the complexities, scale, or scope of the problem – or the impending and far-reaching impact. They look at reports, shuffle paper, and do their best to make decisions, but only sophisticated data-driven modelling can rectify massive outages or high-impact events.

Or picture this. You are a manufacturer with a delayed ship in Long Beach with raw materials impacting three different finished goods. What do you do? Fortunately, your control tower can see that two of the three will be out of stock before the inbound arrives. One of the finished goods is a high-margin item and sold to one of your top ten customers. Your system assesses the cost for air freight and determines this is just enough to cover the top customer and automatically weighs the cost against the loss of margin on the sale. That is the future of transportation logistics.

Prescriptive data analysis will continue to play an increasingly pivotal role in day-to-day operations, helping make and prioritise decisions. When product inventory is severely limited, can we prioritise delivery to customers that would be most impacted by failure to deliver? Can we instantly measure, understand and rank cost to customers and then prioritise by region for fastest delivery? In this way, shippers can fulfil high-impact orders to big-box retailers like Target while managing other options to cater to smaller customers with a less urgent need. Or is it advisable to ship highest margin products first when carrier capacity is constrained? And if we are facing constraints, is it better to continue with a low-cost carrier or allocate budget to pay spot rate shipping costs? All of these questions and more can be managed and answered with prescriptive analytics using best-in-class master data management standards and AI to predict outcomes and prescribe action.

Take Steps Now To Be Ahead of the Curve

So, the ultimate question: Where is your operation in the analytics race? Are you still reporting on what already happened in the past? Are you beginning to explore the abilities to predict what will happen? Has your organisation fully embraced the transition to a data-driven, analytics-led strategy, and do you have the tools to prescribe the necessary actions or a recommended path forward? Wherever you are on the curve, four fundamental factors must be kept in mind:

  • Be honest with your current state If you are still in “hindsight.” Own it and plan for how to make the necessary changes to “insight.” Don’t try to skip a step in the progression of analytics.
  • Plan how to get access to all needed data (internal, external providers, and public data). You may have to subscribe to services, turn to logistics providers and expert partners, etc.
  • Hire a data scientist or find a good partner to help prove out a few test use cases. When you start out you should always choose the project that has the highest value (return) for the lowest effort (investment). Make sure that you are solving a real challenge that drives value.
  • Take your impact and go after more.

Making a transition to a data-analytics-based operation isn’t simple or instant, but the investment will be invaluable. Embracing data is essential to future success, particularly given the events of the past two years. If the Russia-Ukraine War, global pandemic, supply chain shortages, Suez canal, and increasing environmental events tell us anything it’s that the landscape for our industry has changed fundamentally. Cause and effect is the new norm. Expect obstacles, challenges, and a fluid future where custom and practice must give way quickly to prediction, prescription, and inarguable data-driven action to succeed tomorrow and down the road.

Steve Beda is executive vice president of customer solutions for Trax Technologies, a global leader in Transportation Spend Management solutions. Trax elevates traditional Freight Audit and Payment with a combination of industry leading cloud-based technology solutions and expert services to help enterprises with the world’s more complex supply chains better manage and control their global transportation costs and drive enterprise-wide efficiency and value.

Greater insight drives IoT adoption

Greater supply chain insight and improved cost efficiency are the top drivers behind IoT adoption among today’s transport businesses, recent research by Inmarsat, a world leader in global, mobile satellite communications, has revealed.

A significant proportion (71%) of transport respondents stated that greater supply chain insight is a key driver behind their adoption of IoT technologies, while cost efficiency (59%) and greater automation (53%) followed. Despite these benefits, many transport organisations continue to face several key barriers when deploying IoT – with a lack of in-house skills, a lack of turnkey/off-the-shelf solutions and security implications in the deployment phase (36%, 23% and 23%, respectively) chief among them.

Despite the accelerating speed of IoT adoption over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, improvements are still needed to draw the optimum benefits from the technology. Unreliable connectivity, inadequate data strategies, and a lack of skills are hampering many businesses’ ability to reap the rewards of IoT.

Around half of those seeking cost efficiencies or greater supply chain insight (51% and 48%, respectively) felt their investments met or surpassed their expectations – yet for those with a formal IoT strategy in place, these figures were notably higher, at 81% and 65% respectively.

Equally, a higher proportion of organisations not struggling with connectivity challenges also achieved greater cost efficiencies and greater supply chain insights (both 69%). Yet, 13% of transport organisations suffer from a lack of consistent and reliable connectivity post-deployment, hindering their ability to achieve the same.

The IoT skills barrier is also hampering transport organisations’ efforts to achieve their IoT ambitions. In those without a formal IoT strategy in place, this is particularly acute. A large proportion of this group continues to struggle due to a lack of in-house skills in their IoT projects, particularly post-deployment (55%). In organisations with a formal IoT strategy this reduced to 15%, showing they are better equipped with the skills needed to solve issues uncovered during IoT deployment.

Steven Tompkins, Director of Market Development at Inmarsat Enterprise, said: “It is promising to see that the transport industry sees the clear value in IoT to deliver transparent, real-time oversight of its supply chain as well as increasing operational efficiencies. Adoption of IoT technologies has huge potential to deliver these benefits, however both investing in the right connectivity mix and having fit for purpose data management strategies in place is crucial to be able to acquire data in a timely manner and get it into the hands of the right decision makers for best effect.”

Commenting on the findings, Mike Carter, President of Inmarsat Enterprise, said: “The efficiency gains and cost savings IoT can deliver, in addition to the benefits of greater supply chain insight, paints a clear picture as to why most organisations are pursuing IoT. But to get the optimum benefits from their IoT deployments, organisations must ensure they have all the right skillsets and connectivity requirements in place. The research shows that organisations struggling to implement the right connectivity strategies are lagging behind their peers, and those with a formal IoT strategy are better placed to reap the benefits of optimised and more sustainable operations.

“We can see that too many businesses still struggle to deploy IoT projects due to unreliable, insecure, or poor connectivity. This is where satellite IoT connectivity can play a key role. Some of the most valuable data often hails from the hardest to reach places, so investing in effective collection, storage and analysis of that data is crucial to successful IoT strategies.

Inmarsat ELERA, our industry-leading narrowband network, is ideally suited to the rapidly evolving world of IoT. The billions of devices being connected every year are benefitting from global reach, extraordinary resilience, and the fastest speeds, along with the smallest, lowest-cost terminals in their class. ELERA is inspiring new possibilities and enabling organisations from all sectors to access IoT anywhere. It will be a catalyst for the next wave of world-changing technologies, so organisations looking to accelerate their IoT deployments need look no further than Inmarsat and our global partner ecosystem – the widest of any satellite provider – to solve their IoT connectivity needs.”

As part of the research, Inmarsat is also offering businesses the opportunity to measure their IoT readiness versus the respondents in the survey, using a free IoT maturity tool.

CLICK HERE to use the IoT Maturity tool and download the full report – Industrial IoT in the Time of Covid-19.

Setting SMART goals has never been more important

Mark Perera, CEO and Founder of leading SaaS supplier collaboration tech platform Vizibl, talks about the need for companies to put in place SMART goals, outlining what they are and how they can be achieved with the end goal of improving supplier collaboration.

In the new hybrid working environment with reduced commuting and fewer in-person meetings and events, it is easy to get to the end of the day and wonder what you have accomplished.

In 2022, individuals and organisations are still coming to terms with working with – and as part of – a dispersed workforce. The reduced visibility can make it tough for all parties to understand productivity, workloads, goals, and boundaries.

More effectively leveraging the ecosystem

This is also the case when working with partners and suppliers. Many of us struggle to set and stick to goals in both our personal and professional lives, and the same can be said throughout the lifecycle of a relationship with another organisation. Goal-setting is not always that well-embedded into our make-up. It is something we consider when we start a new job or at the start of a new year, but while declaring your intentions is an essential first step, it’s often difficult to turn these goals into concrete action.

Frequently, this is because we set too many goals, or goals that are vague, too ambitious, or impossible to prove progress against.

The need for SMART goals

SMART goals ensure that you avoid these common barriers by clarifying the vision and the ideas, focusing the team’s efforts, and allowing you to deploy resources productively.

Working with numerous organisations with large supplier ecosystems has given us extensive insight into the value of setting these SMART goals with suppliers; they ensure that initiatives and projects are given initial focus at the outset and that they stay on track. This alignment enables Supplier Relationship Management and Supplier Collaboration efforts to flourish.

Adopting this technique means setting goals that are:

  • Specific (keep it simple but significant, stay away from ambiguities)
  • Measurable (easily quantifiable)
  • Achievable (agreed with those involved so that they can be attainable)
  • Relevant (reasonable, realistic, and results-based)
  • Time bound (time-based, time-limited, timely, and time-sensitive)

This not only keeps things simple, the clarity helps navigate any difficulties that arise over the course of reaching these goals.

Putting theory into practice

In theory, this all sounds straightforward, but how do you convert the theory into practice?

When getting started, it’s important to take time to think about the broad picture. Answer the basic existential question: ‘what do I want with this supplier or from a supplier relationship in general?’ and ‘what are good business outcomes for the supplier and for the organisation?’

This will help to visualise the general direction the partnership should take.

The answer to this question might be: ‘I want to drive innovation and collaboration with my suppliers to improve quality and new services’, ‘I want to enhance the relationship with the supplier to help both businesses grow in a mutually satisfactory way’, or ‘I want to be a champion in setting up great relationships with suppliers that drive trust and bring real value to both parties’ It is really important from the outset that you understand what you want to achieve.

Making sure goals aren’t open-ended

With the vision established, you can start answering ‘when do I want that to happen?’ Set a timeline for achieving this in order to give both parties an overall idea of how much time they need to invest in the initiative.

Next, look at breaking the overall vision down into some clear, actionable steps. For example, if the vision states: ‘We want to drive innovation and collaboration with suppliers’. One goal might then be to create a positive, accessible environment that enables suppliers to easily propose innovation ideas. Another goal might be to ensure you are able to capture and track all innovation ideas with your suppliers – and then, subsequently from this – ensure you have an innovation review process that can help you analyse these and determine which ideas are worth investing in.

This will allow you to capture and benchmark how many ideas are being presented. From there, you can create quantifiable and time-bound sub-goals to increase innovative ideas and also track the outcomes of ideas that are being invested in.

The next step is to get specific. Define actions, timelines, deadlines, and measurable KPIs and agree these with your supplier. The more specific you are, the better and easier it is to track and measure. In my view, almost any vision can be translated into clear, specific, time-bound, and actionable steps.

Recheck your goals at regular intervals

Finally, always recheck your goals. Of course, one way to do this is to assess your goals based on the SMART definition. Another way to check is to go through each goal and try to answer the fundamental questions: ‘why, what, who, how, when?’ Whether or not you can answer every single one of these, you’re on the right track. Why? Because you’ve identified existing gaps, and therefore know what amendments are needed to confidently apply the ‘SMART’ logic to each goal.

In conclusion, get to the ‘why, what, how, when and who’, but don’t over-complicate it. As we ease our way out of the pandemic, the world looks very different from two years ago. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, it is more important than ever to start shaping up your goals with suppliers and ensure there is total transparency from all parties around expectations. This will help to significantly reduce the risk of any nasty surprises at the end of the year.

 

Solace expands EDA Summit Program

Solace, a leading enabler of event-driven architecture for real-time enterprises, has affirmed its ongoing Event Horizon commitments with the unveiling of a new set of product enhancements, partnerships and foremost an expansion of the popular EDA Summit Program, devoted to the advancement of event-driven architecture (EDA) in business.

First launched in 2019, Solace’s Event Horizon initiative is geared to help businesses adopt, manage and leverage EDA at enterprise scale, so they can become more real-time in their operations and customer interactions. As Forrester asserts “a key transition happens when the investment in EDA shifts from a project tactic to strategic enterprise architecture.”

The initiative consists of goals and activities set out by Solace to invest in EDA product innovation; build a coalition of vendor partners united in enabling event-driven systems at enterprise scale; advance the state of open source projects; and nurture global EDA community-building through education, networking and thought leadership.

“Our commitment to Event Horizon is motivated by our vision of EDA being a critical and foundational component of the modern enterprise,” said Denis King, CEO, Solace. “We want to help enterprises build that foundation to unlock the full power and potential of EDA, make better products, improve customer experience, enable greater operational efficiencies and more.”

On the education and thought leadership front, Solace revealed that it will sponsor a second instalment of the EDA Summit conference on 4th May, 2022, building off the success of the inaugural EDA Summit conference held in May 2021. The company will also sponsor a series of webinars under the brand EDA Summit Series, starting with a webinar on 25th January entitled Best Practices for Event Enabling your Enterprise Integration Platform featuring insights from Forrester Research and SAP.

“We are excited to see EDA Summit generating so much interest in the marketplace and look forward to fostering it as an opportunity for the top minds in the practitioner community, open source arena and among service and solution providers to collectively advance the state of the art of event-driven architecture,” said King.

In addition to the EDA Summit Series, Solace runs an EDA Practitioner certification program, where to date more than 600 IT professionals have been successfully certified, demonstrating their expertise in the area of event-driven architecture.

Enhanced integration capabilities

Solace also announced progress in becoming the EDA backbone for modern integration technologies with the release of a new advanced event connector for the Mulesoft Anypoint platform, which natively integrates with both Solace brokers and the PubSub+ Event Portal and is easily available from the Anypoint Exchange. Backed by customer demand, the new Mulesoft event connector is just the latest in a series of investments Solace has made to event-enable popular integration technologies like Boomi, SAP Integration Suite and many more through the open standard protocols and APIs they support.

“Solace is dedicated to being the preferred EDA partner for event-driven integration. Our new advanced connector for Mulesoft Anypoint Platform offers our customers a mission-critical approach to easily integrating their applications, cloud services and devices, enabling them to stream information anywhere it needs to be, all in real-time,” said Shawn McAllister, CTO and CPO, Solace.

As part of its goal of helping companies easily incorporate cloud services into their event mesh, Solace has unveiled additional connectors that make it easy to link legacy applications with cloud-native services and serverless functions, starting with connectors for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. For users who want to trigger serverless apps in Azure Functions or Google Run, or store raw events into Google Storage, or push events in SQS, the new connectors let them do so through configuration, with no coding required and no separate connector runtimes to deploy and manage.

Furthermore, the company has announced new client library APIs for popular programming languages Go and Python.

These product enhancements build off the momentum of Solace’s recent Winter 2021 Product Update, in which the company detailed new features and functionality that make it easier to deploy, integrate and manage the PubSub+ Platform.

Simplifying Access

In an effort to make its event streaming and management platform available within the marketplaces of all of the leading cloud services,  Solace hasalso announced that PubSub+ event brokers are now available natively within the Azure Marketplace. PubSub+ Platform has been available in AWS Marketplace since earlier this year and will be extended into GCP and other leading marketplaces throughout 2022.

Ongoing Commitment to Open Standards

Finally, as part of its Event Horizon commitment to dedicate time, resources and code to open source developer communities, Solace announced it has published an open source version of its PubSub+ Event Portal’s event discovery feature as a project called “AsyncAPI Discovery Tool.”

The software analyses event traffic passing through event brokers and generates a corresponding AsyncAPI specification that can be used for code generation, documentation, visualisation, infrastructure deployment, and more. It is built on a plugin architecture that allows it to be easily extended for any event broker and has already been used to create agents that can analyse systems that consist of Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, HiveMQ and Solace’s own brokers.

“A recent survey showed that EDA continues to be seen as a key priority for optimising business, helping global enterprises respond more quickly to events and changes in real-time,” added King. “These latest advances serve as testament to our ongoing commitment to the marketplace, manifested through Event Horizon, to help make the promise of EDA a reality for all organisations across all industries.”

 

 

Supply chain tech firm KlearNow raises $50m

KlearNow, a smart Logistics as a Service (LaaS) pioneer founded in 2018, raised $50m in new capital to transform broken supply chains – simplifying and providing real-time cargo visibility to the customs clearance and drayage processes. KlearNow says its AI-powered platform eases the worldwide supply chain disruptions that have left businesses grappling with delays and shortages.

The Series B investment was led by Kayne Partners Fund, the growth private equity group of Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, with continued participation from existing investors including GreatPoint Ventures, Argean Capital, and Autotech Ventures, plus new investment from Activate Capital.

Though the global logistics market value is $8.6tr, it is a highly fragmented and archaic industry and one of the last to embrace technology and collaborative innovation. The global pandemic has further exacerbated supply chain bottlenecks, accelerating the need for digital transformation.

Investors were drawn to KlearNow’s platform as it eases import/export burdens by digitising and streamlining complex paper-based logistics processes – reducing manual entry times and human errors. The platform takes the digitised data to power its customs clearance marketplace, providing an unprecedented level of real-time end-to-end visibility, collaboration, and cost savings for its customers.

Since its $16m Series A funding round led by GreatPoint Ventures in January 2020, KlearNow has grown exponentially, increasing its customer base tenfold and its monthly revenue run rate by more than 50 times. During this time, US-based KlearNow has expanded into Canada, and launched its UK service in January 2021 to support UK and EU businesses operating in the post-Brexit landscape.

KlearNow recently added a drayage marketplace to its smart LaaS platform to support drayage companies facing planning and scheduling challenges and importers demanding extended visibility. With both customs clearance and drayage marketplaces, KlearNow provides a single view of multi-leg shipments from port of lading to the warehouse. The Series B investment strengthens KlearNow’s position as the go-to digital supply chain solution for businesses that trade across borders.

“This latest round of funding enables us to aggressively accelerate our technology development and deployment, geographical expansion, and talent investments, helping us transform supply chains that power commerce,” said Sam Tyagi, KlearNow Founder and CEO. “We are excited to have strategic partners and investors with deep knowledge in this space, and we believe that with their support, our technology can lead to a meaningful, sustainable impact on global supply chains.”

“The supply chain and logistics industry is primed for incredible disruption in the upcoming years, and continued investment in technology and tech-enabled infrastructure is a critical component of the solution,” said Nishita Cummings, Managing Partner and Co-Head of Growth Equity at Kayne Partners. “KlearNow is the leading technology partner in this space, with an advanced AI-based platform that removes friction in moving goods across borders in an easy, efficient, and cost-effective manner.”

Ashok Krishnamurthi, Managing Partner at GreatPoint Ventures, added: “We are more excited than ever to have partnered with KlearNow. Digitalisation has become mission-critical for supply chain logistics. KlearNow provides tremendous value for the supply chain logistics ecosystem, demonstrated by the rapid adoption of its platform by importers, transporters, brokers, and freight forwarders.

“We are thrilled that KlearNow has continued to expand beyond real-time shipment visibility, offering new unified workflows. During the pandemic lockdowns when the world and companies needed work from home capabilities, KlearNow stepped up, unshackling employees from the office, scanners, and fax machines. With a smart digital solution, supply chain logistics teams were able to work remotely from home and leave the paper world behind. Visibility, productivity, and sustainability are a great combination.”

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