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One of the major activity centers for mobile technology in the supply chain has been transportation and the warehousing and distribution operations with which it interacts. Mobility has given rise to information access from any location and at any point in time and has almost single-handedly short-circuited serial, point-to-point handoffs of communications that delayed information receipt by original requesters. This purposeful disruption of traditional communications chains is transforming business at the same time that it is enabling greater agility and smarter, faster decision making.
What’s hot in mobile
Mobile devices continue to get smaller, lighter, and more efficient. At the same time, there is a movement toward increased use of tablet devices. “With an aging workforce, the use of a seven-inch display that you can hold in your hand meets the human factors test for people in their forties and fifties who are struggling with the screen size,” says Mike Maris, senior director of transportation and logistics at Motorola Solutions. This includes many people in the supply chain workforce.
“We also now have screens that are more readable in bright sunlight, with the ability to change font sizes,” continues Maris. “We have larger widgets on the displays that you can activate through touch, which are helpful for bigger hands or gloved hands that you frequently find with personnel engaged in the supply chain. You can also voice-activate operations, such as asking for directions and getting a voice response from a smartphone. This is complemented with optical character recognition that allows you to either write on the display or speak to the unit.”
In short, there are endless ways to communicate for all of the different situations one might find oneself in while on the move with goods.
Just as significantly, popular consumer-grade mobile tech now allows small- and mid-sized supply chain companies to take advantage of mobile technology in many of the same ways that their richer, larger counterparts can. “There is now a convergence of rugged and non-rugged devices,” says Marty Johnson, product marketing manager at Zebra Technologies, which manufactures mobile printers. “The non-rugged consumer-grade devices are coming into the workflow because they have very acceptable form factors for users, they are readily adopted, and they are cheaper.”
Johnson says that he now sees organizations “down classing” in areas like device reliability in exchange for at least obtaining a modicum of mobile device capability with consumer-class devices. “This works especially well for SMBs (small- and mid-sized businesses) that have more limited financial resources than the larger companies,” he adds.
For Zebra, the task then becomes to manufacture mobile printers that have the kind of interoperability to work with any device they might encounter in the field, whether the device is industrial-strength and hardened, or an Android or iPhone device.
Regardless of whether companies are using consumer- or industrial-grade mobile technology, the end goal for supply chain workers, managers, and C-level executives is total visibility of everything that is transpiring—from the time an order is issued through the time the goods are manufactured, shipped, delivered, inspected, committed to inventory, and sold.
“This visibility of the supply chain has been extended with mobile technology,” says David Rowe, CTO at Echo Global Logistics, a 3PL provider. “No matter where you are, you no longer have to be tied to a desk to obtain real-time information. In an industry like transportation, for instance, whether you are a client or a carrier, you need access to technology and information. With mobile, you’re putting highly affordable IT directly into your hands.”
Where the differences are being made
For C-level executives, the bottom line of the supply chain is the ability to have visibility of the entire end-to-end supply chain. All too often, companies purchase an item or a service and then lose visibility of how it is progressing. “As an example, you can contract for the manufacturing of product in China—but you may not see that product show up on your radar again until it arrives in Long Beach,” says Motorola’s Maris. “This is a big desire now that we see from many companies. They want total visibility of every link in the supply chain. Mobile technology is a big enabler of this end-to-end vision.”
Mobile technology connects the dots in the supply chain through a variety of modalities that include RFID (radio frequency identification), barcoding, real-time mobile cameras, mobile voice, and data communications. All are ways in which people can report into the supply chain on progress. As mobile technology becomes more affordable and ubiquitous, this mobile communications network is expanding outside of the U.S. and into other regions of the world.
“Mobile technology’s power to change the flow of the supply chain is enormous,” notesMaris. “If you are trucking goods out of Long Beach to Dallas, and you suddenly get an alert that the inventory is needed instead in Minneapolis, that route can immediately be changed through mobile communications so the goods get where they are needed at that point in time.”
With mobile technology, companies are also able to track and trace from earlier points in the process. One case in point is the food industry, which begins in the fields where crops are grown. “The farm employees doing the picking can use mobile devices like printers to label containers with the specific field where the crop was picked,” says Zebra’s Johnson. From a safety standpoint alone, the capability is critical. It allows for rapid disaster intervention in the event that a particular crop from a particular field is contaminated and needs to be rapidly traced and recalled from the market.
Mobile technology is also playing a role in the logistics of getting fresh produce to market to both meet demand and to reduce spoilage. Market identification begins with forecasting where the highest demand for a particular item is, and then matching that demand to available supplies that are likely to be in other geographical areas. Mobile technology is being used during the transportation process to remap and redirect deliveries based upon changing market demand while goods are being transported—and it is also being used by large chains such as Walmart to monitor moisture content and temperature exposure of produce, which is then used to tag items for freshness—which ultimately determines whether the items will be first-in or last-out in the inventory distribution process.
The benefits to inventory that in-process mobile communications provide are not limited to the food and beverage industry. In healthcare, the ability to communicate and alter logistics in real time saves money because medical supply houses are able to reduce safety stock.
In one case, a medical supply house accustomed to carrying $7-8 million worth of inventory has been able to reduce safety stock in warehouses by $2-3 million because of the ability to rapidly reroute supplies based upon changing needs.
In companies heavily reliant on effective logistics, such as package carriers and telcos, black box mobile communications are wired into trucks. The devices feed information about where each truck is going and also how it is being operated. This information helps companies understand why some drivers have better gas mileage than others and also aids in being able to prescribe training in areas such as trying to use the gear shift better, or following the same route.
“One of our business partners reported that they had seen double digit decreases in fuel costs since instituting such a program,” says Maris. “The other benefit is that drivers know the best route to take to deliver the goods, and when orders come up, you know where everyone is, so you can select the truck that is closest to the package or the route to do the delivery.”
Another area of business that is heavily reliant on excellent logistics is service trucks in the field. These trucks effect repairs at homes and businesses, with a single service van often carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in spare parts inventory. By equipping each service van with mobile communications that control, track, and report on inventory availability and consumption, the company has greater visibility of where the parts are and which service vans can be dispatched depending on the needs of customers. Many of these vans use mobile printers that tag and scan parts, which improves inventory accuracy. The end result is hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, because total visibility of the fleet and the entire parts inventory reduces the amount of extra inventory that you need to invest in and carry.
For both retailers and the transportation channels that they utilize, 3PLs like Echo are also providing Web-based mobile applications that assist in transportation management. “Echo has developed a mobile application that provides clients visibility into their supply chain,” says Rowe. “Our EchoTrak mobile app offers the flexibility to rate shipments, select carriers, create watch lists, view load boards, or view shipment status. Clients can track and trace shipments with an Android [device] or an iPhone. They are able to click to email or click to dial their Echo representative directly for each of their loads. Having access to all of these features while away from a computer can help boost their visibility and productivity.”
The combination of smartphones and GPS technology also yields detailed visibility of specific geographical areas. For example, if you are a trucking business, you can take a metro area like Dallas and have visibility of all of your trucks down to the street level. If you see two trucks pull up alongside each other, and if they are there for awhile, you can investigate what is taking pace. This visibility takes excess time out of the system and also eliminates a lot of paperwork.
“We have also seen some of the large trucking companies equipping their trucks with signature capture on mobile devices,” says Maris. “This gets deliveries logged into the system immediately and cuts down the time for bills to be issued to customers. Using the old method, the customer would sign the paperwork which would then get turned in for processing before the customer could get billed. This process improvement reduces the number of days outstanding for sales.”
Underexploited areas
Important advances are being made with mobile technology. As these advances are being made, financial analysts are sharpening their pencils and are beginning to establish compelling ROI cases that demonstrate how early mobile intervention in the supply chain turns into savings in staff hours, more inventory turns, less carrying inventory, fewer product quality issues, and greater customer satisfaction.
Nevertheless, there are still critical areas of mobile technology that remain underexploited. Some of these areas involve new mobile technology and techniques while others concern a better deployment of mobile technology that has been used in the supply chain for years.
A good example of the latter is RFID, which hit a trough of disillusionment several years ago. The good news is that work still went on. Thanks to this work, distribution and transportation have finally figured out where RFID belongs and where it works best. Present practice is to use RFID on tags and pallets, which has increased accuracy in loading. In the aircraft industry, to counteract the introduction of counterfeit parts, RFID is being used in the chain of custody because it can record and track who touched the part and where it came from.
Mobile printers are also securing their niches in trucks, warehouses, and distribution centers because there is better understanding of what they do best. “Mobile printers can save steps, but they can’t replace the high volume output of a static printer,” says Rowe. “But it’s great for the one-off situations that come up. The portability of mobile printers also allows them to be set up in areas impossible for static printers—like on forklifts.”
New mobile technology applications like video analytics can also improve operations and are showing up on the scene. To establish analytics, companies set up cameras in different parts of a facility, and then feed the footage to software that analyzes what’s right and what’s wrong about what’s being videoed. One example is the London subway. If the video software notices a bag that has been sitting in a train station for too long, it can flag this and send a message to a supervisor. This technology can also be transferred to the supply chain. Ultimately, the video becomes data and you have the choice on how to interpret this data.
Finally, there is the potential to improve the overall back-office processes that must occur for everything to fall into place. An example is proof of delivery for drivers. If you can document on your mobile device and take a picture of what was delivered and then use automation to send that in to a system, you can take out a number of back-end business processes. This simplifies the operation and also cuts costs.
Creating a sound mobile technology strategy
A sound mobile technology strategy is going to depend on how well you understand your business and where mobile technology can make the most difference. You should know your expectations for deployment and ROI, and your focus should be on application simplicity for your workforce. “First defining your business strategy for mobile technology is critical,” says Maris. “I am constantly surprised at how even many major companies fail to do this. Instead, they throw the process over the wall. Some of these companies recognize the weaknesses and they call in 3PLs to fix it.”
One key to effective mobile deployment is keeping the process simple and going with technology that you know and that you are confident will provide a sound building block for future technology expansion. For instance, if you are a transportation and warehousing company and you decide to create a mobile methodology around the iPad and iPhone because they are comparatively cheap and comfortable to use when compared to more hardened and expensive mobile devices for the field, also understand that all it takes is a trucker to drop a phone on the street, where it shatters for the mobile communications to break. In a case like this, you can lose a day of productivity, because everything has to be done by hand.
So, buy the right tool for the job. Also, if you are considering using smartphones, make sure that the brand you use is upgradeable and likely to be supported by the software that you use. Phones with proprietary operating systems are not as likely to “keep up” as those with upgradeable operating systems.
Finally, perform a thorough beta test first before deploying a mobile technology or application across your entire supply chain. Remember that with mobile technology users like to “pull” rather than “push.” Once they understand that a great mobile application is available, they want to download it now and use it—so both corporate IT and outside mobile technology suppliers must be prepared to support a rapidly growing user base. wt
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