Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and Istio
IoT applications for supply chain
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IoT applications for Supply Chain
Andrej Planina
Spica International
Andrej.planina@spica.com
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What is Supply Chain?
Manufacturing -> Distribution -> Transport -> Retail
IT systems
1. Ownership of goods changes through the chain
2. Information must be ahead of shipments
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Spica Background
• Spica provides IT solution for regional
Supply Chain actors
• Team of 100 engineers in 6 countries
• 3.000 installations
• 20 years
• Consultants
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Visibility of Products
• Do we really need to track each item?
NO!
• Let‘s track packages!
• Package related problems:
• Single or mixed product?
• All items with same expiry date?
• There are many repackaging points in a
chain!
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How to use IoT in Supply Chain?
• Sensor on each product? NO!
• What characteristics do we need to track?
1. Location
2. Temperature (product or environment?)
3. Acceleration (fragile products)
4. …
• How often do we need this data?
• Online (mobile connectivity)
• Offline and sensor with recording capability
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Where to Put Sensors?
• Supply chain is very price sensitive!
• What is acceptable ratio between price of sensor per price of tracked
goods?
• Sensor on each product?
• RFID with price of 0,10 EUR per unit is not acceptable
• NO!
• Sensor on each similar product? (same batch)
• Pack of 20 units in a box.
• Can we achieve 2 € per IoT sensor per box?
• NO!
• Sensor on each pallet? (mixed products!)
• YES!
• Who will invest into IoT capabilities?
• The owner of products!
• But ownership changes over supply chain!
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Do We Have Sensors Already on Items?
• The only standardised sensing technology in
supply chain is BARCODE!
• GS1 standards:
• Product level coding
• Additional product level coding (batch, expiry)
• Package level coding
• Data exchange technologies already heavily in
use
• RFID is standardized but very rarely in used
in a supply chain
• Only closed-loop applications exist
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Closed Loop Applications
• Let‘s track our containers!
• Container loading and unloading needs to be
tracked with the use of bar-codes
• Container departure and arrival needs to be
tracked with IoT connected sensor (RFID)
• Additional information need to be collected
during container life
• Container with a sensor needs to return and to
be re-useable
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Recap: IoT in Supply Chain
• Single item tracking? NO!
• Closed loop applications? YES!
• Barcode for items? YES!
• RFID container tracking? YES!
• Ownership problem
• Standardisation problem (GS1 needs to
lead!)