Industries in Singapore are pushing ahead with AI, robotics and automation technology. As a country we’re optimising our manufacturing capabilities, but we’re also going one step further by adding intelligence & continuous data within the vehicles that connect manufacturing with inventory management and consumers.
Factories today have more built-in intelligence than ever before. Whether it’s spotting defects in products before they leave the line, or sensor monitoring for processes or processes, connected systems are offering you increasingly detailed visibility into quality control and output.
And the race for even better factory intelligence is accelerating globally!
Once your product has been meticulously monitored during production and storage, your data on that product should not stop when it gets loaded onto a vehicle. When products leave the factory, data feeds must continue from the start of transit to the last-mile optimisation of the delivery—and this goes further than simply knowing where the product is.
China is setting a good example of this way of thinking, looking at ways to make their factories smarter. But how is “smart” being defined? Is it collecting more data, or using that data to unify production with logistics and ultimately do more?
But if location doesn’t tell you what’s actually happening to the product, what should you know in terms of operational intelligence?
All these tell a story about the product’s transit, and play a huge role in the quality of end delivery.
A complete perception of a product’s lifecycle matters because it determines whether that product reaches the intended consumer in its intended condition. It should also be ready to be used, installed or consumed in the way the manufacturer intended it to be.
Responsibility doesn’t stop at the manufacturing gate, and blame can’t be placed on transit just because technology was more focused on the factory line.
Quality control should travel with the product through the means of telematics and mobile technology. GPS tracking is being successfully combined with many other technologies to give manufacturers peace of mind about the products they’ve just dispatched from that gate.
Managers can now monitor the quality of those products all the way to when they reach the final consumer.
Goods like perishable food, pharmaceuticals and temperature-sensitive cold chain products are subject to temperature changes when on the move. Telematics provides us with the ability to secure and monitor the immediate environment where your cargo sits while it’s being transported.
Cold chain trucks need temperature monitoring technology that not only alerts to fluctuations in climate, but also shows the reasons for that fluctuation:
All of these are possibilities, but you’ll never know how to solve a problem unless you know what it is.
Temperature monitoring is one way to keep cargo safe. Another is cargo door sensors and cargo cameras that activate via motion sensors. All of these feed valuable data back to your control room where you can see what’s going on and take appropriate & decisive action.
The vehicle itself also benefits from being monitored, since it’s the vessel that moves your products from one place to the next. If these trucks or vans aren’t being driven safely, or if they’re idling for too long in one place, the quality of your products are at risk.
It’s about knowing what’s going on as much as possible in order to piece together contingencies that prevent problems in the real time—and the future.
A supply chain of custody starts when a product is manufactured, and moves all the way down to the last-mile delivery of that product. There are multiple points in between that are different for each company, and it’s these points that you need to keep an eye on, because each one poses a potential risk to the quality of your goods.
Fleet management software solves the problem of knowing where products are, when they arrived there, and in what condition they arrived. With the help of geofencing, virtual boundaries can be created at various points, alerting managers to when those products reached respective destinations.
From factory, to vehicle, to depots, to the customer… geofences monitor it all!
In addition to location data, time is monitored to ensure speed & efficiency in handovers. ETAs are an important factor in logistics, and this is closely monitored using GPS tracking technology as well as AI scheduling that’s relative to real-time circumstances.
When gaps of “what happened” need to be filled in, nothing tells a more comprehensive story like dash cam footage or recordings from external vehicle cameras. Whether it’s a question of who was at fault in an accident or which driver opened the cargo doors too many times, indisputable camera footage is invaluable in protecting your investments.
Factory data isn’t without its flaws, and most of these flaws stem from fragmented data. Meanwhile, logistics telemetry is making leaps & bounds in creating ways to monitor products in a unified way that tells a full story of the transit.
Could these methods be superior to the data being derived during the manufacturing process? In manufacturing (yes, even AI-powered manufacturing) data is often compartmentalised, leaving managers with the challenge of connecting each compartment with the rest. Because of this, manufacturers risk losing sight of the full picture.
In fleet management, it’s all brought under one umbrella and interpreted in a way that’s easy to understand. Mobility data could become a valuable feedback loop for production, packaging, and quality control: Manufacture. Move. Measure. Learn. Improve. And at any point, you should have the control to INTERVENE as well, because all this mobility data is provided in real time.
With the advent of World Manufacturing Day, let's ask ourselves just how far smart manufacturing intelligence can actually go. Have we reached a cap for how much technology we actually need in our factories? Isn't it time to connect everything together for a more unified industrial process?
Collecting data is great, but only if it serves a purpose. Let's get the full picture of our products from start to finish by connecting the dots between every process and optimising the product condition by the time it gets to the end user.
Check out the full article from Cartrack's Group Chief Operating Officer, Richard Schubert, here: https://ecommercenews.asia/story/your-factory-is-getting-smarter-so-why-does-its-intelligence-stop-at-the-factory-gate
As Asian manufacturers embrace AI, connecting factories, mobility, and product data ensures goods are not only made smarter, but arrive exactly as intended.
