Project-driven deliveries

A finished good is an article that has completed the manufacturing process but has not yet been delivered to the customer. Waiting times for finished goods often involve weeks or months where goods are stored in different types of warehouses to finally reach their destination.

Especially, this is true for businesses that deliver for larger projects such as the construction of factories, telecommunications stations, power plants, etc. Here you may want to stall finished goods and delay deliveries until late in the project.

Long storage times mean high storage costs. To reduce the company's recorded storage costs, warehouses owned by a third party are often used. Since the product has been delivered record keeping in ERP and own WMS systems are no longer relevant. The goods are in no-mans land.

Missing goods in these types of projects may delay the entire project and involve considerable costs. We find that people in different geographical regions become involved to find out the whereabouts of the goods. This cause frustration and adds additional cost to the project.

How do we deal with it?

- The best solution depends on the exact conditions. In a common scenario, we are looking at freight volumes of hundreds to thousands of items with one or more remote warehouses. Typically we would recommend using IPS technology. Goods are tagged on delivery and an easy-to-install infrastructure is fitted at local and remote warehouses and also the site for final delivery. Using IPS mesh technology we can easily extend coverage to cover tens of thousands of square meters both indoors and outdoors.

What about long-life trackers?

Long life trackers by all means - using connectivity over low power wide area network and positioning techniques as wifi location you may get a reasonable battery lifetime. Nevertheless, you will still only know that the goods are on the site. You will not know its location. For sites with thousands of assets, good location accuracy is a must.

With IPS tracking many advantages are gained:

• Know when the goods arrive at the remote warehouse
• Find the number of packages sent in the shipment
• Understand the exact location of all goods – on remote and local sites
• Follow the flow from local warehousing to the end customer
• Years of battery life tracking all movements throughout the day

It is all about getting rest and peace of mind. Having the security and knowledge that all goods have been finally delivered to the customer. Where they stand and when they arrived.

With sensor-based solutions, we have the opportunity to sense the goods. Has the product been exposed to excess moisture, temperature or shocks? Has the packaging been opened? Is it being stored outdoors or indoors?

We see an extremely short payback period for this type of installation in cases where problems have previously occurred.

Want to know more? Get in touch!