In the news this Monday, technology advancements in the supply chain dominate the conversation. Royal Canin, a pet food manufacturer with a global footprint, has adopted the FuturMaster cloud-based, demand-planning platform to improve its management of ongoing supply chain complexities. The company is using the technology to control supply and demand across its 16 global factories.
Also, in the supply chain field, Nisa Retail Limited has become the first company based in the UK to invest into pallet-tracking technology. The spokesperson, Nigel Mitcheson said, “The technology is helping us to be more efficient and sustainable when it comes to using pallets for our distribution requirements. It’s also helping us make significant cost savings by enabling Nisa to improve delivery accuracy when servicing Nisa partners.”
On the topic of IoT, the Port of Rotterdam has revealed that it is using a hydro-meteo IoT application designed to manage its shipping operations. The device collates data from water, tide, wind and visibility to deliver a comprehensive report that drives efficient real-time decision making.
Across the rest of the news there have been some interesting developments in viewpoint, innovation and conversation. The Guardian reported on how Facebook has been labelled ‘digital gangsters’ by a report on fake news, the Financial Times lifted the lid on China’s steadily growing legal technology patent portfolio, Forbes looked into how blockchain – that inscrutable technology few can explain – can provide a secure way of sharing information across the supply chain, a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay developed a hardware-based encryption system to safeguard data, and a journalist got an inside look at Amazon’s technology test bed complete with robotics and AI and the impressive warehouse of tomorrow.