FEEDS: Fresh Produce End To End Digital Supply Chain Solution - A SAP IoT HCP Solution for Digital Supply Chain

[Former Member]

Introduction

Hello everyone, I am Arihant. Around a year back in our organization we came up with a problem statement of how to reduce the wastage across a fresh produce supply chain. The origin of the problem statement was a continuous interaction with multiple retail and CPG clients especially the Supply chain teams. Taking this problem statement we connected up with SAP Co innovation Labs Bangalore and in our further brainstorming and design thinking sessions we collectively came up with an idea of an IoT based platform connecting multiple players of the disparate supply chain. Such platform will require great flexibility as well as scalability. Data generated by IoT devices and other integration points would be huge and so SAP HANA cloud platform became a natural choice.

FEEDS The concept

The fresh produce travels thousands of miles in multiple transport modes to reach the end consumers. Such supply chain is characterized by discrete multiple players, lack of real time visibility & traceability. There is no common channel for the multiple players to collaborate and optimize the supply chain operations which suffers due to huge amount of wastage and losses (20~40%). Also in recent times food specific regulations are becoming stringent and requires the organizations to trace the produce back to its place and time of origin. Hence we collaborated with COIL Labs and came up with FEEDS – Fresh Produce End to End Digital Supply chain solution.

Accessible through easy to use role based mobile apps - FEEDS enables gauging of Freshness index at each leg of "Farm to Fork" supply chain, provides Real Time IoT enabled Condition Monitoring , while also enabling collaboration & transactions between different roles.

Collaboration with SAP Co Innovation Labs

As part of SIP 2015 program of SAP COIL Labs, we collaborated with SAP Labs in which for a nominal fee SAP provided the standard infrastructure( HCP, Cloud Connector, ECC, etc.) and hand holding expertise for their latest developments. A dedicated team of Design, Domain, Functional and Technological background from both organization participated in a joint effort to create the Solution. Right from Design thinking and brain storming sessions to wire framing the concept to backend integration, the teams combined effort to come up with great idea, insights and implementation.

Core Business Challenges:

FEEDS addresses the following core business challenges

• Lack of real time supply chain visibility and decision making
• Inability to trace back, adherence to Compliance norms
• High Wastage (20 to 40%) & loss of Product freshness along the supply chain
• Fragmented supply chain consisting of multitude of Players (Farmers/Cold Chains/Transporters/Retailers etc.) and their multiple back end Systems. This results in lack of Collaboration and Optimal reaction to dynamic supply chain events.
   

FEEDS: Business Benefits

FEEDS will result in process improvement & operational collaboration in real time. The contextual analytics will help in smart decision making for mobile executives on the ground. Few direct benefits are

• Improved freshness and shelf life for fresh produce
• 15% ~ 20% reduction in overall wastage and improved quality control
• Real time backward traceability and forward visibility 
• Compliance adherence
• Improved consumer confidence and loyalty

Leveraging SAP HANA

FEEDS is built on SAP IoT HANA Cloud Platform and leverages various Digital enablers like IoT, Mobility, Cloud & Contextual Analytics ,Real time Optimization and is interfaced with in premise ERP/ SCM ,Store and 3PL systems.

The real time condition monitoring requires IoT enablement and huge amount of streaming data handling which is enabled leveraging SAP HANA cloud platform. The IoT device have multiple sensors for parameters like – Carbon di oxide, temperature, Humidity, Ethylene & air flow. These parameters are captured and sent to the IoT HCP for monitoring, analysis & reporting.

 

Further HANA is best suited for contextual analytics like rerouting options considering the produce parameters, its rate of deterioration, weather condition, nearby store, cold storages and other disparate data sources which needs huge computing power.

SAP HCP’s integrated architecture provide FEEDS the capabilities to easily integrate the IoT devices and multiple disparate data sources and to churn that huge amount of data to provide real time contextual analytics, workflow etc. all on a role centric mobile application.

 

FEEDS connects the entire supply chain for Fresh produce end to end. SAP HANA is the collaboration platform for all the stake holders, right from Retailer to 3PL and warehouse/ cold storage owners.

All the transactions, workflows & analysis are enabled on role based mobile applications using SAP UI5.Very intuitive by design, the applications leverages the features of mobile device like barcode scanning, taking image and uploading, calling a number etc. creating great user experience.

 

The FEEDS Team

From Tech Mahindra: Ravi Kumar Vadaga, Bibekananda Patnaik, Abhishek Bajaj, Saifulla K Sabjan, Vadivazhagan S, Saranya Sampath, Arihant Surana

From SAP COIL : Vasanth Kumar, James Michael Amulu, Clement Selvaraj, Suvodeep Das, Ramya M Ravishankar, Srinivasa Challa Reddy, Debasish Patnayak, Rupali Arora.