Hi Sanjay, what led you to this industry?

“In my past life as co-founder and CEO of an RFID  startup, we solved the problem of visibility within the four walls of the company. After its acquisition, I studied the various issues within the supply chain and discovered that real-time visibility outside the four walls of the company was lacking. In other words, companies had little or no knowledge of the movement of their goods and assets as they moved through the network and any relayed data was delayed and unactionable.

“Talking to many companies, we discovered that the problem was global. Real-time visibility is a precursor to digital supply chain transformation and Roambee was founded to deliver real-time visibility on demand globally and use it to transform the traditional supply chain to be autonomous, contextual, dynamic and self-healing

Roambee has been identified as one of the eight notable vendors in the ‘2022 Gartner Tracking and Monitoring Business Process Context: Magic Quadrant for Real-Time Transportation Visibility Platforms'. What does this mean?

“It means our technology has earned the trust of industry analysts, our customers and partners through many successful deployments and proven ROI. It means that Roambee is servicing the needs of a big market.

“The quadrant reconfirms my belief that Roambee has a product-market fit and these awesome products are an outcome of great minds and passionate people and Roambee has all three things – product, team and market.” 

What does it mean to “monitor your supply chain?”

“Enterprises lack end-to-end visibility into the supply chain to effectively reduce costs and risks. To put this in context, 67% percent of supply chain leaders believe the number of disruptive events have increased, compared to the last three years (Source: Gartner responding to disruptive changes quantitative initiative 2019).

“More than 3/4 of organisations have moved toward differentiation through services rather than cost leadership, for example, overnight delivery (Source: Gartner Business Value of Supply Chain Initiatives Survey 2019). 61% of supply chain leaders believe digital giants pose a moderate to high risk of disrupting their business. For example, low prices in truckload shipping to gain market share.

“A supply chain is characterised by uncertainty on the demand side and associated uncertainties on the supply side. Getting the supply and demand forecast right is the ultimate holy grail, but implementing it is not trivial. These uncertainties lead to a higher risk of disruptions in the supply chain network. Any small outage can create a ripple effect that can propagate up and down the supply chain network (SCN).

“Roambee's sensor-enabled platform proactively monitors the enterprise supply chain in real time. Roambee monitors upstream and downstream goods and assets, from raw materials (inbound supply) to finished goods (outbound supply) across internal networks, supplier networks, and customers who have their own logistics or use third-party logistics providers. 

“Monitor your supply chain means:

• Delivering visibility: example – rescue “at-risk” shipments and inventory based on its location and condition
• Business signals: example – identifying supply chain glitches and identifying opportunities to improve and increase OTIF compliance
• Real time insights: example – benchmarking transporter performance and developing service level agreements (SLAs)
• Real time foresights: example – predict and reduce uneven inventory by location
• Digital Twin: example – reimagine the optimal route based on quality, condition, and context.”

How to build end-to-end supply chain visibility?

“Supply chain complexity is increasing as consumers demand more products, a broader selection of purchasing channels, and more personalised promotional offerings. These consumers have expectations of higher on-shelf availability which puts pressure on companies to reduce inventory costs.

“Pressure on delivery performance has intensified, as has the need for manufacturers, retailers and carriers to work together to create efficient, reliable and responsive supply chains. In its effort to optimise its supply chains, the consumer industry has evolved in the way it measures delivery performance, moving away from traditional order fulfilment metrics to adopting the more rigorous “on-time in-full” (OTIF) delivery metric. OTIF measures the extent to which shipments are delivered to their destination according to the quantity and schedule specified in the order.

“The ability to use a real-time visibility platform that not only tracks business shipments in real time, regardless of the transportation mode, but also identifies potential delays and predicts the possibility of late/early delivery or time at the time of shipment creation is a significant impact on the company's top line. The platform offers real-time information at your fingertips, allowing for accelerated and proactive decisions/actions.

Building end to end supply chain visibility has five phases:

• Start with simple track and trace – in this phase we recommend our customers to simply affix sensors on their goods and assets and let it flow through their network. This approach lights up the supply chain and helps our customers identify the glitches. Customers use the information to make improvements to their systems and processes. 
• Receive business signals – we encourage our customers to define the business signals of interest so that Roambee’s platform can deliver them on demand. These signals could be as simple as delivery confirmation signals to complex as demand shock signals, OTIF signals, theft signals and more. 
• Dissect with Insights – in this phase, customers start using Roambee’s analytics platform to slice and dice data to understand patterns such as transporter performance, route quality, theft hotspots, shipment handling scores and more. 
• Apply predictions – at this point, Roambee’s platform is trained to start making predictions that includes ETA, damage risks, spoilage risks, theft risks, quality risks and more. 
• Develop What-ifs, also called Digital Twins - location data, shipment data and lane data can now be combined to simulate supply chain scenarios.  

What do the next 12 months hold for you and Roambee?

“We exist to provide value to our customers, to empower every customer. Over the next 12 months, we will automate our logistics. Our technology helps automate logistics such as shipment integrity verification, delivery confirmation, inventory verification, on-time in full, chain of custody, excursion management and more.”