Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Cargo Beacon (Cargo Beacons – no unexpected delays or losses in shipments of valuable cargo)
Période du rapport: 2016-11-01 au 2017-04-30
The ambition of CargoBeacon is to make delays in shipments, damages or losses to valuable cargo known to the stakeholders as quickly as possible, so that consequences can be mitigated with least impact on global just-in-time manufacturing and supply chains. The product is an example of a combination of a new service and product that will have a direct impact on achieving European transport and mobility goals by ensuring that less goods are lost or damaged in transit.
A 6-month Feasibility Study in the topic SMEInst-10-2016-2017: Small business innovation research for Transport and Smart Cities Mobility was granted with the objectives to validate product/market fit for CargoBeacon in the two market verticals of transportation of industrial goods and medical substances. Additional objectives were to validate the economic feasibility of CargoBeacon by working with the business model fit of CargoBeacon and to develop and validate a mixed channel distribution strategy. Market validation was done by target customer interviews to understand key market requirements, additional requirements, standards and certifications needed and how integration into existing IT-systems best can be done. Market validation resulted in a number of action outcomes whereas some were done during the study and some remains until after the study. Today’s CargoBeacon logger is well suitable for the industrial vertical whereas additional sensor requirements exist for the vertical of medical shipments. Besides the need for product change the medical vertical has additional barriers. Extensive sets of requirements and standards, dictated by different authorities, were found making us decide to postpone market entry in the vertical of medical transportation. Additional requirements for positioning and automatic quick access to cargo KPIs lead us into a task for exploring possibilities of adding a low cost modem to CargoBeacon, preferably with the ability to also provide goods positioning (at least roughly). Emerging Low Power Wide Area Networking technologies promise both of these requirements but need further exploration. A mixed channel distribution was explored where direct and indirect sales are combined to plan for scalability while still staying in close contact with customers during product development and ramp-up. Several potential OEM partners were interviewed with the purpose of becoming indirect sales channels. These interviews resulted in additional requirement to the supply and production of CargoBeacon loggers and the access to portal based data.
The potential impact for IoT sensors in logistics is substantial. Improvements in supply chain leads to less damaged goods with better utilization of our limited environmental resources. Being able to monitor shipments of food and medicines more easily leads to socio economic improvements. In a monitored supply chain food, or vaccines, can be recalled without putting people at risk due to vaccines that has lost their effectiveness or food that has become bad due to high temperatures.