The damage and loss of products in supply chain cost the industry billions of dollars every year. That’s a huge amount of money and waste in products that are being thrown out - That's the issue Spotsee is tackling with their product: indicators that track and record data such as temperature, tilt and impact throughout a shipment journey. There are a lot of challenges in this area that supply chain professionals are facing, Angela talks about the top realities companies are facing and how exactly Spotsee can help you save time, money and waste.
Spotsee allows companies to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to damaged products. Instead of receiving damaged products, blaming the shipment company and filing an insurance claim, companies can now collaborate with the freight forwarders to determine why and how the damage happened and work on fixing the problem together, all based on data. These monitoring programs reduce damage to 40%, which can translate into tens of thousands of dollars saved for certain companies.
Spotsee works with several market segments as well as SMEs that are looking to grow. By having real time data on product journeys, companies waste a lot less time, energy and money fixing these issues. In the long run, this is a much more sustainable business model which can give companies a huge competitive advantage. Spotsee are also big on company culture, find out more about how they are encouraging the next generation to come and work in supply chain. Their ambition? To aggregate all the data from every journey, product and company so their customers can take real actionable steps from large-scale data analysis.
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Meet Catapult, an intuitive digital platform that helps businesses make decisions based on freight rates. The founders were tired of the manual process of keeping track of rates through word documents, excel spreadsheets and decided to build a solution to help manage all the different rates from different carriers.
What does all this technology mean for your business? Virgil Ferreira, the CEO of Catapult joins us to talk about how their platform helps businesses see rates from different carriers including ocean, air and ground, giving logistics providers more visibility into their rates so they can increase their margins. A Challenge that logistics providers face is that they don't have access to industry data but Catapult changes that as providers can also compare their own data with industry data and see it all in a standard, easy-to-use view. The biggest challenge logistics providers face is understanding how to get the best market rate. With Catapult, businesses can use the tool to see the gaps in their system and focus on improving profit, which all providers are looking to do!
Their typical clients are mid to global sized forwarders with a large number of vendors and a large customer base. These are clients looking for technology enabled solutions and need help getting their rate management house in order. By using a rate management platform, logistics providers can apply margins where they want, map different features into an internal format and use this across different modes. As Virgil says, the main things companies should be focusing on in 2020 is understanding what the customer is expecting and encouraging interoperability across different structures.
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BEHIND THE SEAMS - Suuchi Ramesh is a software engineer with a background in supply chain, she is also the founder and CEO of a tech company that is bringing supply chain and fashion together called, Suuchi. Suuchi is the next generation technology platform for fashion, managing everything from design through distribution.
The main challenge the fashion industry faces is that the entire supply chain needs to be unbelievably fast, diversified and efficient. Suuchi helps companies get to the next level by taking care of the back end, and letting companies focus on what they do best: scaling the brand. Suuchi helps companies diversify the supply chain by digitizing the entire process, because all brands must start thinking of supply chain as a strategic competitive advantage
What sets them apart? Transparency. They’re able to track and trace every process in the supply chain, which allows them to provide their customers with truly data driven solutions. Suuchi has the flexibility to work with all size of companies and their customers use their software in a few different ways: some use their software just for supply chain, others use the software from the design of products all the way to the distribution of their products to their end consumer. Suuchi is also very passionate about helping their customers and brands become more sustainable and reduce overall waste in their businesses. When creating Suuchi, they were mindful to include in-depth data and analytics that helps to optimization sustainability and the reduction of waste strategies. Suuchi is now going into series B and expanding their reach in supply chain, all while providing smart, sustainable solutions.
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Claudia is our Women in Supply Chain Feature for February and is someone who enjoys life to the fullest. Her attitude is: family first, career second and community third. She graduated in engineering, joined IBM, ran an entire supply chain, worked in GE Healthcare and is now working in supply chain for Google. Her career has been a huge adventure, and today she shares some of the nuggets of wisdom she’s learned over the years.
She’s had many challenges in her career as a female on a supply chain team, but it’s her positive attitude and openness to taking care of others that helped her get to where she is now. She’s really had to push for opportunities, and has seen the industry evolve over the 36 years that she’s been working in supply chain. Things are getting better, with now 25% of leadership positions held by women. Claudia works hard to educate leaders and encourage the right conversations about diversity and openness.
What about supply chain? Claudia explains that companies aren’t using data as they should be. She says that it’s important to get the basics first, make sure to have the right KPIs in place and then analyze the big picture. Her advice to fellow supply chain leaders is to meet with customers on a regular basis. Understand the voice of the customer and don’t always think of optimizing a function but instead, the end to end journey. Her plans for the future are to keep on learning and growing, never wasting a day and keep pushing for diversity.
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