Adam Robinson, marketing manager at transportation management company Cerasis, says the IoT offers many benefits to the global supply chain, including revenue growth, asset utilization, waste reduction, customer service, profitability, sustainability, security, risk mitigation, working capital deployment, agility, and equipment uptime.
In manufacturing, it offers the ability to quickly manufacture products with a short-lifecycle, make changes in the middle of production, and use time-sensitive data to make more accurate predictions of demand.
And in transportation, the IoT offers the ability to easily process profitable returns, consolidate shipments based on multiple factors, reroute goods instantaneously, and service parts on-demand.
“The decisionmaking capacity of smart devices within an IoT-enabled network also affects the overall supply chain structure,” Robinson says. “Traditional supply chain tasks in procurement, planning, logistics, and supplier management would be streamlined by intelligent, data-driven systems in a collaborative multi-enterprise environment. While logistics managers may need to acquire an enhanced skill set, their primary functions would be focused on designing capability and network optimization, inter-enterprise collaboration, disruption and risk mitigation, and supply chain orchestration in an effort to exploit competitive advantages and differentiation.”