How IoT Can Improve Your Supply Chain

How IoT Can Improve Your Supply Chain | LoadProof

The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room. — Eric Schmidt, Google chairman in 2015

In the world today, everything is connected and everything is becoming smart. We have smart homes, smart cities, a smart grid and even smart transportation. Soon, a lot of our daily interactions will be with tools that have intelligence, including potentially refrigerators, bottles, food containers, clothes washers, clothes dryers, dishwashers, and more.

Soon, our refrigerators will be smart enough to order and get milk and other essentials delivered right to our door, before we realize we’ve run out. Our cookers will have food cooked and ready for us when we come home from work. And will be able to program and operate all these smart things from our mobile device. In fact, in a sense it’s already happening in a small way with the Amazon Dash button.

Obviously, it is not going to be very long before these capabilities come to the supply chain. There are some really obvious benefits if it did. For example, pallets with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, can notify arrival based on global positioning system (GPS) coordinates published from the GPS sensors. Even though advanced shipping notices (ASNs) are available today that tell a receiver when a shipment is arriving, that information is not real time. RFID chips on pallets can be done in real time to let the receivers know immediately that the shipment is at their dock. Workers can be at the ready.

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