Discovery’s Solution to Disrupt the Traditional Supply Chain
A supply chain management (SCM) system is a set of software solutions that manage the movement of goods, finances, and data as a product/service move from point of inception to its ultimate destination. SCM activities incorporate everything from product development to logistics. There is a need to track the item as it moves through the supply chain - from the manufacturer to the transporter, then to the warehouse and finally makes its way to the store. While traditional supply chain solutions faced the early challenges of a globally minded and rapidly developing world economy, they eventually reached their limits. The food we eat and the medicines we use all come from remote suppliers which are transported and stored in warehouses. There arise many inquiries, such as-
- How can perishable commodities be tracked from suppliers to customers?
- How can the temperature be monitored during shipment to avoid contamination?
- How can spoilt products be quickly suspended even if they are in transit or stored in a warehouse?
Organizations have been demanding more insights into real-time views across the entire supply chain. Goods and information could not traverse easily from one part of a supply chain to the next without manual efforts. Inventory visibility and transportation management across the supply chain were limited by systems that were not connected.
In this dynamic business landscape, the traditional supply chain management model is not suitable for efficient working and thus we are driving IoT, blockchain, AI and edge computing into the image to solve the problem of visibility, agility, operational cost, security etc. Let us compare Discovery’s solution with traditional supply chain model.
| Attributes | Traditional supply chain | Discovery’s solution |
| Integration | Supported by an old legacy system with very low integrations among various parts. | All the individual systems are integrated with each other properly. |
| Inventory monitoring | Cannot monitor the inventory once it gets dispatched from the point of inception and thus it may lead to physical loss. | Reduction of inventory waste due to effective supply chain management process using Cliot tag. |
| Performance | Focuses only on the performance of entities at the end rather than considering the intermediaries. | Constantly monitors the existing practices at regular intervals to improve performance and efficiency. |
| Agility | Market changes demand quick and timely action; thus in the traditional approach, it is difficult to securely provide services and deliver responses according to the changes. | Uses edge to process information, the most secure and quick way to deploy new services and easily scale to meet any new challenges. |
| Response time | Information and data is often passed between parties quite slowly and focuses on a linear model. This results in slow information exchange and a lengthy response time. | Instead of sending information on the cloud and waiting until it is processed, we use edge computing where the process takes place at the edge and thus no delay. |
| Technology | Technology around supply chain functions is falling behind and is inflexible. | Utilizing advanced hardware and software technology, the ecosystem can be upgraded as per the market dynamics. It can thus have a massive reach. |
| Cross-functional skills | Lacks cross-functional skills which impacts the financial and operational decisions thus losing the opportunity to use data effectively. | Holds advanced cross-functional skills and many of the operational skills in the supply chain are function specific. |
| Security | In the traditional supply chain, there is always a risk of theft, privacy and damage to goods due to lack of visibility in the process. | Use of innovative and improved technology like IoT, blockchain and edge computing keeps the data secure including encryption, virus scanning etc. |
With respect to all the attributes, our solution proves to be beneficial to any supply chain industry. Apart from the above information, it is an IoT led supply chain solution that is run through a network of decentralized nodes, residing on the smartphones of a community of users. Discovery makes IoT an affordable solution for tracking daily products by disrupting the costs of the hardware and tracking simultaneously. Our self-chargeable tag, Cliot, helps in monitoring goods-in-transit to gain information regarding temperature, spoilage, damage etc. We are providing this at a very affordable rate which costs as low as $0.10 and brands can track the goods at just $0.04 per month. We solve the latency problem by processing on edge instead of sending to the cloud and waiting until it is processed. There was a need for such a solution since various problems were identified in the market frequently.
Keeping in mind the problems faced by companies who adopted traditional supply chain model, we are building a solution which uses all the innovative technologies like blockchain which makes supply chain process traceable and secure, IoT which helps in inventory management and automation of manufacturing process, which solves the problem of latency on the cloud. The Discovery team holds tremendous domain knowledge and has also excelled in the areas of supply chain and technology. Supported by a strong team, Discovery’s solution will soon disrupt the market as it is a one-stop solution to all the problems at affordable rates.
