INNTACT - Supply Chain Visibility

Over 1/3rd of the world’s food gets wasted annually due poor temperature control techniques. iNNTACT is a heuristic ‘supply chain visibility’ platform enabling better product quality & lesser wastage.

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Inspiration

With a past experience of solving engineering problems for customers in the supply chain, powered with the domain knowledge we gathered and the technology expertise we have in IoT, we dreamt to build a solution to address the wastage problem for food, meat and the biopharma Industry.

What it does

INNTACT is an wholistic solution for Tracking and Monitoring transportation of environment-sensitive produce, via road, air and ship, with the end goal of bringing out the gaps in the transportation processes and suggesting solutions to strengthen the process. We provide various sensors in the form of temperature, humidity, pressure, light, IMU and more sensors, a scalable IoT cloud platform built on Azure, web app built on React for the dispatch team as well as consignee, cross platform driver app built on React Native, and a deep learning based Recommendation Engine to ingest all the sensor data and provide smart recommendations.

How we built it

Our experience working with Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform gave us insights to build a supply chain visibility solution combined with Telematics.

It has been built on the Azure ecosystem, leveraging Azure IoT components, Azure ML pipelines and various Azure cloud services to provide a visibility solution with the combination of sensors, stream ingestion, APIs, web apps and event handling components.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial challenges were around the below areas: 

- How do we have a **common platform** to address challenges faced by multiple modes of transport. 

- Where can the solution be more elaborate and where does it needs to be restricted to focus on the visibility aspects considering there is a **variety of stakeholders** in the supply chain. 

- How do we address **different types of perishables** in the platform and yet not give a generic solution. 

- How to make it **plug and play** and an open architecture where multiple layers of domain intelligence can be added.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We would like to call out the below as our accomplishments:

  • Coming up and attempting to implement the idea of saving food and medicines and helping the world in some way to sustain better, is an accomplishment for us.

  • Inputs and feedback with several Industry veterans gave us the validation that our solution was in the right direction.

  • Our first trial run in a real field proved to us that this IoT solution works as expected.

  • Analyzing the process of air-flow within a reefer and its impact on different products is a research topic, and we here we are trying to make it a working solution which is not an easy task but definitely worth it we believe.

What we learned

We learned that there is so much data in the world that can add value if it is captured, interpreted the right way and used to solve the right problems that can make an impact on the lives of people with value added innovation.

What's next for INNTACT

With INNTACT we want to go deeper and try to solve the wastage issue with not just Agri Industry but also the seafood and meat industry, the biopharma Industry and hence ensure the platform can cater to a wide variety of products in each of these Industries hence providing a very contextual solution within a generic framework for supply chain. We are also exploring on sustainability to help analyze the carbon emissions in the cold chain for the Reefers, ULDs, Air freight and Ships, that is across modes of transport. Last but not the least, with the release of Microsoft's Supply Chain Platform, we are hoping to contribute as a partner and strengthen Microsoft's platform with our learnings and the components we have built for iNNTACT.

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