The funnel of the global supply chain today has several breakdowns in its order because of logistics issues and temperature excursions that account for up to 80 percent of the cold chain problems. For instance, over $35 billion worth of food products get wasted annually which is approximately 1.3 billion tons and 30% of pharma products get scrapped every year inducing a huge loss to the pharmaceutical companies. Such items require temperature-controlled transportation and due to soiled processes, the whole supply chain goes through distress.
The overall damage due to temperature variations is not limited to the cost of ruined products. It also contains the capital invested in operations such as associated reporting, root cause analysis, and corrective and preventive action which can add up to millions of dollars in one year for a single business. Also, not to forget, this amount of wastage is creating a massive burden on the ecosystem. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the carbon footprint of waste in the food sector alone is an estimated 3.3 giga-tons of carbon emissions, which is approximately 7 percent of all global emissions.
So in 2007 Gisli Herjolfsson founded Controlant, a privately-owned international company that offers next-generation cold chain solutions as a service (ChaaS®), to tackle this problem. Controlant is on the mission to provide consumer safety and reduce junk by connecting end-to-end supply using digital tools. It is ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System certified and fully validated and compliant under GxP and 21 CFR Part 11.
“Through our efforts with AUCMA and Intellectual Ventures, the innovative arm of Global Good, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded organization, our cold chain monitoring technology is helping to safely deliver vaccines and medicines throughout Africa.”
Re-imagining cold chains
According to Controlant, there are multiple risk points in the present logistics and supply chain for perishable products. They observed that the cold chains with multiple hand-off points have always lacked on-demand access to actionable data that cites the integrity of delivered goods and enables real-time decision-making about a product’s quality. Therefore, because of this disrupted connectivity and low-grade data collection, the businesses are unable to collect information regarding a product’s condition at any point except the dispatch location and destination.
ChaaS: An approach to cold chain risks and management
Controlant’s pay-per-shipment, ChaaS solution provides a single source of supply chain truth, consisting of reusable IoT data loggers that send mission-critical data and insights in real-time to a proprietary, cloud-enabled software platform, and cost-efficient operational services. “It gives powerful insights into cold chain quality conditions and efficiency from the first mile to the last,” says Herjolfsson. “We are digitally mapping the global cold chain.”
Controlant customers leverage the improved visibility to establish a network of stakeholders, increase efficiency, ramp-up sales and boost revenues. The Controlant supply chain visibility solution monitors in-transit and at-rest shipments going through any transportation medium- air, road or sea- and delivers advanced analytics and comprehensive insights into supply chain operations starting from suppliers, through production, distribution, and the last-mile. These insights include location, environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, light, utilization, and anomaly detection. Herjolfsson shares, “24/7 global monitoring and response services provide control-tower visibility for every single shipment, ensuring product quality and integrity and proactively reducing waste. Controlant customers are achieving supply chain improvements leading to an annualized value in the tens of millions of dollars.”
Gisli Herjolfsson, Founder, Controlant
By solving problems such as real-time visibility, scalability, quality and safety compliance, cost-reduction, risk mitigation and above all sustainability, Controlant has become one of the most revolutionary supply chain solution providers.
Disrupting cold chains
Most importantly, by cracking the cold chain matrix with innovative technologies; and partnering with organizations that seek to help children and adults living in low-resource settings without access to necessary medications and vaccines, Controlant is working to improve the living conditions in these developing areas. Herjolfsson proudly mentions, “Through our efforts with AUCMA and Intellectual Ventures, the innovative arm of Global Good, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded organization, our cold chain monitoring technology is helping to safely deliver vaccines and medicines throughout Africa.”
Controlant’s mission-critical solutions not only level up businesses’ supply chains but also work as an extension of their team. Their intelligent cloud platform, IoT hardware, and management, 24/7 support and response, onboarding and training along with all other professional services pack an end-to-end seamless solution for all the logistics needs of cold chain suppliers and users. Controlant’s custom business intelligence based on dashboards’ data analytics drives better cost saving through improved decision-making. While stressing on quality and compliance, in terms of operations, management, logistics, IT and even their relationships with logistic partners, they keep their focus at delivering value to the stakeholders and ultimately contributing to a greater good.
“Controlant does what it says; it has already saved our launch shipment worth $15 million.” -Associate Director, Global Pharma Logistics
“If you’re already running a data logger-type program, you’re going to see a difference. If you haven’t run a real-time program before, it’s going to be completely eye-opening.” – Food Quality Assurance, Global Food Brand
“Controlant is better designed, more robust, advanced, and intuitive. The level of service exceeds any other.” – AMEA Freight Lead
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