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The challenge
An industry-leading manufacturing company with annual revenues in excess of $37B engages multiple suppliers to regularly ship containers to various manufacturing locations and to multiple supplier locations. To ensure the manufacturing supply chain process is not interrupted, containers are often required to be shipped on short notice. To keep these high value assets safe while in transit, the company utilises specialised containers to ship parts.

These containers are limited and require constant monitoring by plant managers, logistics coordinators and inventory supervisors to ensure availability. If containers are not available, the supply chain is delayed. Finished product shipments are impacted, causing significant operational and production costs, thus reducing margins and revenue. The manual tracking of containers is a time consuming and manual labour intensive process. The manufacturing company needed greater visibility of actual activity to balance planned activity against operational decisions. The company approached Numerex to find solutions to maximize efficiency.

The solution
Numerex’s supply chain optimisation solution, iManage, built on nxFAST® platform holds the answer. Including tracking devices, wireless network connectivity, and a cloud-based application the Numerex iManage solution enables location reporting for the shipping containers and leverages that information to provide advanced data analytics. The solution is configured to collect data from the tracking devices on a regular basis and deliver reports, alerts and notifications as appropriate.

iManage provides visibility into SLA compliance and performance against defined business rules and metrics. Utilising this approach enables the company to better allocate resources, increase production efficiency and prevents unnecessary acquisition of inventory, carrying costs, and expediting expenses.

The solution deployed across multiple product lines at the customer’s manufacturing facilities and at key vendor locations. Notifications via email and SMS text inform stake holders of critical changes that may require immediate attention. The customer has access to tools that support long-life device management and a flexible system configuration to match their enterprise business rules, metrics and management. Battery life is also managed efficiently based on individual device load.

The results
Numerex enables the manufacturing company to increase visibility in its supply chain by identifying optimal product deployment. iManage is an IoT system capable of providing live geographic visibility, tracking, and insightful asset management.

iManage empowers the customer to:

• Reduce purchases of new containers and transportation of components in unauthorised containers
• Realise cost savings in resource allocation
• Minimise transportation of components in unauthorised containers
• Realise better asset protection and loss control
• Reduce operations and transportation costs

Features

• Location, movement, dwell and cycle time tracking
• Dashboard views with advanced analytics
• Email and text alerts — notifies professionals of problems
• Configurable device reporting schedules
• Integrated mapping visualisation

Benefits

• Improves material flow and inventory management
• Prevents manufacturing floor stoppage
• Significantly reduces expedited shipping charges
• Provides data for tracking compliance with 3PL SLAs
• Mitigates loss or theft of shipping racks or containers