Steve Rogerson reports from this week’s IMC supply chain online conference.

Supply chain problems rarely make front-page headlines, but that has changed this year on two fronts. One has been the ongoing challenge of getting Covid vaccines out to, well, everyone in the world. The other, and it was a short-lived yet expensive problem, was a cargo ship that managed to wedge itself in the Suez Canal and bring a large chunk of the global supply chain to a grinding halt.

While these are rather extreme examples of supply chain challenges and difficulties, they illustrate both the good and the bad of how far the whole logistics industry has come in the past few years and how it has embraced the latest IoT technologies.

This was the subject this week of one of the industrial IoT online sessions organised by the IoT M2M Council (IMC). The supply chain panel started with a keynote address by Niall Strachan, head of product strategy at chip designer Arm’s Pelion division, who opened by saying that even though logistics was an incredibly well-established market, the pandemic had increased pressure on global supply chains. This has been exasperated by political decisions from global powers, notably the USA and China, which have caused a lot of friction in the supply chain and illustrated the need for something more robust.

He said there were six main areas where technology had improved the logistics industry, the first being drones for helping with first and last kilometre deliveries. Secondly is the way blockchain has increased the use of smart contracts. Thirdly, the IoT in its raw form has seen a plethora of small devices for tracking and providing the information to improve decision making. Fourthly is that exciting combination of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence running on the high-end computing power that is now available. Robotics are fifth as they improve factory and warehouse automation. And, finally, driverless vehicles are appearing in warehouses and being used for last kilometre deliveries with the long-term prospect of more end-to-end applications.

One of the big factors driving the use of these technologies is me. Well, and you, and just about everyone else. If we order something online, we expect it quickly, sometimes even the same day. And if it can’t be delivered quickly, then there are other online retailers who will fill the gap. Fast delivery has become a deal breaker.

“Everyone wants everything very fast,” said Anne Hoyer, founder of GSH Tech Agent, who moderated the panel.

This was why, of course, there was much frustration with the Suez crisis (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Deliveries to Europe from the Far East were stuck in containers on boats in a traffic jam. Enquiries about deliveries were met with shrugs of shoulders; a lot of those containers did not have tracking devices and people couldn’t even find out where that new shirt was in the long queue of ships. IoT tracking technology is still not universal.

The other issue that has become big in supply chain circles is security, and Sridhar Ramachandran, CTO at Somos, said there was no one size fitted all answer to this. And this is not just electronic but physical too as IoT devices are often in remote locations and are thus vulnerable to a physical attack, such as by, say, swapping a SIM card, though that has become less of an issue with the growth of eSIMs.

He recalled a case years ago in South Africa where IoT devices attached to lampposts had their own SIM cards, which people would steal, put in their phones and use them to make free phone calls.

Mobeen Khan, chief operating officer at Blues Wireless, said generally cloud companies did a good job with electronic security but physical security was harder to achieve as someone with a probe who knew where to put it could gain access to a device.

David Ludwick, IoT and mobility director at Tata Communications, said that while there was a big acceleration in IoT adoption, it was important to have a use case before designing a system. Wait until there is a problem to solve or you could be setting yourself up for failure.

On security, he said the more devices that were out there, the greater the attack surface, but these could also be used for improving security in other ways, such as monitoring for unusual activity.

In conclusion, the IoT has been of great benefit to the whole logistics and supply chain industry, but there is still a long way to go. Managers need to keep their supply chains agile so they can respond to changes in supply and demand. IoT is what can enable that but more sophisticated tools will be needed.