Bell Business Markets announced the launch of Smart Supply Chain, powered by Bell IoT Smart Connect, an “as-a-service” IoT aggregation platform designed for fleet and supply chain operators. The new platform aggregates multiple IoT data sources and operational data sets into a single dashboard accessible through Bell’s Self Serve Centre.
The operator says Bell IoT Smart Connect reduces business complexity by offering a unified view of a company’s entire fleet, including trucks, trailers, drivers and the temperature of cargo, to optimize and automate tracking and management. With one dashboard, fleet operators can view all events, incidents and alerts and provide near real-time status updates to customers while ensuring cargo and drivers safely reach their destination on time.
Smart Supply Chain powered by Bell IoT Smart Connect features cold chain monitoring to automatically record temperature levels and provide near real-time alerts when they fall outside safe ranges while cargo is in transit; a driver scorecard that aggregates telematics data and optional video analytics to monitor and rate the behavior of individual drivers and teams, as well as fleet management by pairing fleet management data with operational data.
Smart Supply Chain sends data gathered from sensors installed in trucks and trailers to the IoT Smart Connect cloud-based platform over the Bell LTE network. Smart Supply Chain is a managed service with additional support offered through Bell Professional Services, which works with organizations to provide nationwide mobile installation, product integration and custom development support.
Tarifica’s Take
All over the world, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chains are suffering from serious disruptions and irregularities, with the economic and human consequences being felt everywhere. Needless to say, anything that can help solve this extremely complex set of problems will be very welcome. Bell, the third-largest mobile operator in Canada, is taking the initiative, through its business division, to leverage the Internet of Things to make a contribution to supply-chain logistics.
As we have seen recently in a number of diverse connections, the IoT in conjunction with mobile networks has the ability to greatly streamline and complex automated and non-automated processes and systems of processes, and supply chains are an excellent candidate for this approach. Remote monitoring, real-time control and data analytics enable businesses to maximize efficiency and productivity and reduce safety risks of all kinds. A system like Bell IoT Smart Connect, while it certainly cannot eliminate problems brought about by large-scale global causes, can still do much to mitigate the damage and contribute to getting the world’s interconnected supply chains back up and running at full capacity again.