When you can truly know that you have a change in the risk profile of a container or conveyance in a global or local supply chain, you can be assured that you have built a secure supply chain. You will have verification that you have created or implemented the tools needed to provide visibility into events, exceptions, and key milestone reports. By having the visibility into the parameters that truly matter, it provides you with the ability to take the necessary action to remedy any events or exceptions that occur anywhere in your global trade system.
Your job as a Supply Chain Executive or Transportation VP is to create a way to find the needle in the haystack that works for each and every shipment, truckload, and last mile delivery. In other words, you must know about the container or trailer that is not where it should be, is no longer intact, has a self-reported event from inside or outside the container, or has gone places where it should not have gone during transit. No guessing, no calculations, just facts.
Visibility as a Service (VaaS) is now a requirement for carriers, BCOs and logistics service providers. Visibility can only be as complete as your data harvester’s IT links to events that are recorded by others in the supply chain. But the gaps that remain where IT systems cannot see and thus cannot report, are still vast in the global supply chain. Once the cargo/conveyance/container leaves the stuffing facility, it is free to wander until it gets reported upon arrival at an overseas terminal in-gate. Once the cargo/container or conveyance has arrived at a domestic ocean terminal, the out-gate activity is logged and reported, and the unit is again free to wander until it arrives at your vendor’s operation, your transload site, or distribution/fulfillment center. Once your container or domestic trailer has left the railroad’s dwell-filled terminal, until you open the box at your DC, that trip may take weeks or days, pass through several custody transfers, and be subject to the growing threat of theft and/or used for contraband.
These gaps in coverage are where risk levels are elevated. Today, the only way to address these gaps is to add some sort of a tracking device to the box, container or conveyance. The hard way to discover that your container or goods were compromised is when the truck or container arrives at your receiving dock, and staff identifies that the seal is not the correct seal for the load. Now you have a problem, but it’s too late to do anything but react to the problem, sometimes days or weeks later.
Adding just a locator device still does NOT address security in transit during those gaps. Devices that report location coordinates are indeed helpful because they document that a container, truck, or other conveyance has wandered about and not taken the prescribed route or the most efficient route from the terminal (ocean or rail) to your facility. Location devices can be valuable, but they fall short because they can’t see the sky or self-report when an event or an exception occurs inside the conveyance throughout the entirety of the supply chain. A locator can identify deviation outside a planned corridor or geo-fence, but in order to have a secure supply chain, the events, exceptions, breaches to that box and other anomalies from inside the box must be transmitted in real time to a control desk where immediate actions can be taken to remedy the issue.
Historically, companies used exception reporting to track incoming goods from vendors that were identified as “not on schedule”. These time-sensitive exceptions drove decision in the supply chain management to expedite shipments, use team drivers, or air freight goods in order to remedy the exception of delivery schedules so that production of parts and components could occur as planned.
But events that are reported by the device to a control desk create visibility into the needle in the haystack. The Bloodhound Tracking Device is fitted with a suite of sensors that self-report on a scheduled timeframe from the device to the control desk detailing any anomalies in real time, while also providing regular readings from all sensors that indicate “no events or anomaly readings” from the sensors.
The device also can provide ad-hoc reports when thresholds for sensors indicate issues inside the container or trailer such as:
- CO2 or ammonia reporting due to smuggling of humans inside the container or trailer.
- A picture, taken in real time when the door is opened anywhere in the supply chain when the door has been compromised.
- An alert when a chemical is introduced to the container that is not compatible with the loaded contents of the container.
Now you have real time, actionable intel that can give you immediate inputs on time, location, and event type to drive actionable recovery or response. This is where the supply chain becomes interactive, and the data is useful and actionable. The device self-reports “all is well” on a schedule and also self-reports whenever activities or events require action or intervention. That is true visibility into the risk profile of your global supply chain.
Feel comfortable going to sleep at night, knowing that the Bloodhound Tracking Device is reporting every four hours globally, and every 15 minutes within North America and it will immediately report when any sensor threshold is exceeded anywhere in your global transportation network. If or when you have an event or exception on your hands reported from the Bloodhound Tracking Device, you also have a clear competitive advantage, because you have the tools to respond to the exception or event and the visibility into the parameters that truly matter.
Last but not least, with truly accurate, archived data on your supply chain and its risk profiles, our AI-powered internal algorithms will detail, catalogue and provide patterns of life for shipments from any O/D pairing. Having this additional tool allows for more strategic rather than tactical intel for longer term decision-making and planning.
This is the future of global VaaS: Visibility as a Service. The Bloodhound Tracking Device provides global shippers and logistics providers with the information needed to drive communications and actions based on real inputs directly from your goods. You will benefit by significantly reducing loss and theft, increasing utilization of inventory in transit (it gets to where it is supposed to be on time) and eliminating dwell time and demurrage fees because you manage a very efficient supply chain.
Your competitor who uses even the most sophisticated visibility tools cannot execute the way you can.
