One Network has years of experience in healthcare supply networks that provide medicines and vaccines to hundreds of millions of people in Africa and around the globe. For example, the One Network platform for supply chain planning and execution is used by the Ministries of Health in Nigeria, Ghana, and Rwanda, providing comprehensive inventory visibility across all health facilities for real time supply demand matching and collaborative decision making.
One Network’s NEO Platform handles supply chain forecasting, sourcing, planning and execution (with routing and logistics optimization) for what may be the largest supply chain control tower deployment in the world. The platform’s capabilities include GPS and telematics tracking of shipments, vessels, vehicles, and packages on a global basis, including IoT devices with temperature sensors for temperature exception tracking of assets, including smart refrigerators and temperature-controlled storage devices.
8 Essential Capabilities to Optimize the Cold Chain
Ensure Product Quality:
Traceability Across the Supply Network
To ensure product quality we need a system that enables us to track unit-level items, spot problems, find an optimized solution, communicate our action plan, and orchestrate a response. Business network technology enables us to do this. Business network platforms, like One Network, enable full traceability for every item from start to finish, providing visibility across final products, intermediates, and raw materials in real time from their source, across trading partners and to the end consumer.
Supply Networks operate based on the trading relationships between producers, manufacturers, consumers, retailers, distributors, and suppliers. These trading relationships are structured as many-to-many, where a brand can interact with all consumers and a consumer can interact with all brands. This extends upstream in the supply chain network where a distributor can trade with all suppliers and a supplier can trade with all distributors. And with a business network architecture, as a participant in the network you only need to define yourself once to open trading relationships with all parties. That’s in stark contrast to the old ERP monolith days, where every supplier had to support a point-to-point connection with every distributor, and every distributor had to support a point-to-point contact with every supplier.
End-to-End and Real-Time Logistics
To successfully represent the complete logistics lifecycle across a network of supply chain participants (warehouses, plants, DC’s, carriers, LSP, customers, contract manufacturers, and suppliers), the One Network platform serves as a system of engagement, integrating and harmonizing data across internal and external players. It also operates with the capability to embrace many systems and to assume control of any point in the shipment execution lifecycle as needed, even serving to replace legacy or redundant systems. By integrating transaction information across all parties, the solution enables real time visibility of the entire logistics lifecycle from purchase order to shipment order, shipment execution, track and trace, and to financial settlement.
Real-Time Information with IoT and Telematics
One Network is a unified platform that combines the power of telematics with planning and execution to provide global visibility, quality tracking, and optimized decision making. One Network’s Telematics Solution captures, analyzes, and consumes real-time streaming data from GPS, IoT devices, sensors, and electronic data logging devices (ELD) embedded in containers and vehicles, across vessels, trucks, airplanes, and warehouses. It provides real-time status and locations of orders and shipments, predicted future locations, and accurate arrival times.
It also provides advanced monitoring for temperature of the product and container, and logistics parameters such as door openings. In addition, the platform’s intelligent NEO agents consider factors, such as speed, traffic, storage capacity, and delivery times to optimize logistics and the supply chain. The platform also alerts users to potential problems with predictive analytics and proposes optimal solutions using prescriptive analytics as well.
Have a System of Record for Tracking Compliance and Identifying/Reporting Violations
Whether verifying compliance or spotting and reporting an exception, a reliable network-based global system of record creates enormous efficiencies when compared with the alternative – which is fragmented, partial, and maybe manual systems and processes. When the system of record is a multiparty business network platform like One Network, then all stakeholders – manufacturers, distributors, carriers, customers and hospitals can be sure they are looking at the same real-time, accurate information.
Best of all, these capabilities are an integral part of the NEO platform, which is your TMS, planning, and execution system. So once an exception is spotted, it can be resolved and a solution implemented immediately in the same platform.
Quickly Get to the Root Cause of Quality Issues
When an issue does arise, traceability enables you to quickly pinpoint the source, whether it’s a manufacturing or packaging issue, or the violation of a temperature specification for a vaccine. Rather than relying on a patchwork of systems or manual processes, a network platform enables rapid root cause analysis based on accurate, up-to-date information that is visible and consistent for all involved parties.
Respond Quickly and Optimally to Spikes in Demand or Disruptions in Supply
Reality will certainly differ from your plans, so when you experience demand spikes or supply upsets, companies will need to have a rapid, optimized response in the near term. A real-time network platform offers your best solution with Global Supply-Demand Matching and process orchestration across business partners with dynamic reallocation. When problems happen, the network enables you to identify supply chain exceptions in real time and resolve them optimally at the network level with intelligent algorithms and the latest in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, to provide automated decision-making and prescriptive analytics.
With One Network, shipment visibility goes much deeper than basic transportation visibility and includes visibility into every order that makes up the shipment. And the inventory that makes up the shipment (even in the container) can be used for dynamic decision-making in real time and is available for dynamic reallocation to orders – just like any other inventory quantity in your warehouses, plants, or healthcare provider locations. This explains why One Network helps optimize business performance with automation and prescriptive analytics in ways that others can’t – to drive extraordinary service levels and value.
Read more from the original source: https://www.supplychainbrief.com/?open-article-id=21312289&article-title=solving-the-cold-chain-challenges&blog-domain=logisym.org&blog-title=the-logistics—supply-chain-management-society-