Keeping Track & Trace: High-tech tools bring supply-chain transparency

…And we want to see it all

A newcomer on the scene – startup Airspace Technologies, which just secured an $8 million Series A round of funding last month – is betting that supply chain transparency will be the watchword for track and trace this year. The company provides expedited, last-flight-out service for urgently needed items.

Ryan Rusnak, chief technology officer for the threeyear-old startup, said Airspace’s Shipper App allows complete transparency no matter what digital device customers use, allowing for geo-fencing notifications to be sent when shipments enter a predetermined area. “We allow technicians in the field or waiting at a facility to be notified their part is X miles away in realtime,” Rusnak said. Most customers, he added, need a specific part for an assembly line to keep running or a part needed to get a plane back in the sky. “Almost all of these are next-flight-out items,” he said.

While the track-and-trace firm does not do real-time temperature monitoring, its key attribute is transparency. Advantech also manufactures sensors to measure various cargo parameters, such as location, time, shock and vibration, temperature and humidity. All those are fed back to the cloud or a tablet or some other resting place that generally falls underneath IoT umbrella, Allen said.

The key function, Allen said, is the speed and accuracy of the alerts that the sensors trigger. “The driver or pilot should at least be alerted, saying ‘Hey, you’ve got a condition here. You’re out of tolerance.’”

Customers are now more interested in what is happening at all times behind closed cargo doors. “Where we tend to stop is once the air carrier picks it up… That’s where a lot of our involvement drops off,” Allen said. “But we’re starting to see more of the connecting of all the dots coming into the conversation, whether it’s a freight forwarder, a FedEx/UPS or whatever.”