Use Cases

Pharma Parcel Shipper

A major pharmaceutical company ships a million cold-chain parcels a year to doctors' offices and hospitals across the US with essential medicines for patients. These parcels must be delivered in a fixed period of time, but the risk against delays must be balanced against the needs of operating sustainably and lowering transportation costs.

At any one time, there are tens of thousands of parcels being transported through UPS and FedEx. The company needs better oversight to ensure their valuable parcel shipments aren't delayed or damaged due to mishandling.

CargoSense turns every parcel shipment into a digital twin based on the carrier events streams, without sensors. These events build the foundation for when each parcel enters and leaves a station on its way to its destination. Based on each of these dwell events, CargoSense builds digital twins of each station in the FedEx and UPS networks. These twins use machine learning to predict when a parcel should leave based on its day/time of arrival. This supplements the expectations on the parcel shipment as it progresses throughout the carrier networks. A digital agent oversees every parcel shipment and uses the digital twin to detect mishandling and risk of late delivery. If an overdwell exception is detected, an exception digital agent emails the carrier customer service seeking resolution and processes responses using customized Large Language Models (LLMs) for communications.

CargoSense uses the aggregate carrier network behaviors that are being captured to construct an optimized routing table for all zip codes in the US from distribution centers to end customer locations. This daily-updated routing table includes the minimized SLA (preferably ground) for a carrier, day of week to ship, recommended origin DC and a risk score. The risk score factors expected dwell times at stations using probable routing, projected weather delays and thermal loads based on projected dwell temperatures. The table is used by DCs to fulfill orders daily that minimize the overall shipping costs and carbon footprint per shipment, while balancing against projected risk to the product. The network learns from actual vs. planned routing to ensure that future route choices continue to be optimized. The combined solution delivers an annual ROI of millions in transportation spend, increased customer service, and decreased loss.

This solution included:

• Digital Twins
• Digital Agents
• Machine Learning
• Large Language Model

Pharma 3PL

A global 3rd Party Logistics (3PL) provider that services every major pharmaceutical has a digital SOP (standard operating procedure) system they use to ensure that customer shipments are handled correctly at each step of the shipments journey. These shipments are both high-value and highly constrained due to the effect of temperatures on the products (cold chain). Embodied in the digital SOP is the route a shipment will take, the transportation temperature and storage temperature constraints on each leg and milestone, the flight information and other details. The 3PL employs hundreds of analysts across the globe that check on these shipments, on a continuous basis, to ensure they are progressing according to plan and constraints. The 3PL sought to use IoT technology to reduce the number of low-level tasks their analysts performed, increase their quality of service, and reduce operational costs.

Leveraging a globally certified family of IoT devices (both in-country and airline) CargoSense worked with the 3PL to deploy a set of IoT gateways into the cold rooms of its 125 global pharmaceutical warehouse stations. These IoT gateways allow digital twins of cold rooms to be monitored 24x7 by digital agents to ensure that the rooms are always keeping a proper temperature range, and email alerts when they are not. The stations received sensor carts to use for inventory management of sensors they place on each shipment, and CargoSense maintained a central inventory which refreshes each station as they consume the sensors on shipments.

The digital twin of each shipment is produced through a custom integration with the 3PL digital SOP service which provides detailed routing, transportation and dwell temperature constraints. The sensors on each shipment provided the temperatures and location data when the pallets are at each station, as well as temperature logs during transport, which provide a cost-optimized means of using IoT devices at scale. The digital agent for each shipment oversees the progression of arrival and departure events, transportation temperature compliance, and storage temperature compliance for each leg and milestone. This custom digital agent updates the 3PL digital SOP service to annotate the tasks for each shipment in the SOP and mark them as completed, or raise issues when detected. The 3PL analyst workloads are reduced significantly which has enabled the 3PL to decrease the number of analysts required, increase the number of shipments they can service, and achieve an immediate ROI on the deployed solution.

This solution included:

• Digital Twins
• Digital Agents

Global Security Team

A global technology company has a security program that oversees the transfer of tens of thousands of annual high value (high IP) shipments between their locations spanning 55 countries. The program has been operating for years prior to engaging with CargoSense and used prior-generation of IoT devices and significant manpower to provide the needed security oversight. The goal of the security program was to reduce the amount of manpower required, increase the fidelity of the information they were using, decrease time to action, and optimize the warehouse operations in the use of IoT devices.

CargoSense worked to certify a next generation of IoT devices globally for the company. This included over 60 country certifications and 70 airline approvals. Although IoT sensors can be applied to a shipment in the US and shipped virtually anywhere in the world without certification, if you import IoT devices into countries with the intent on placing them on shipped goods leaving that country, in-country certification becomes necessary. CargoSense designed a warehouse cart which contains the inventory of two types of sensors that the site uses on shipments, and maintains a distributed inventory management function that ensures each location has sufficient inventory for their shipment volumes. CargoSense streamlined the use of this cart and reduced the time it takes warehouse operators to provision a shipment by 90%.

The digital twins of each shipment are created through a custom data feed which includes ERP data, TMS data, location data and carrier tracking numbers. The IoT sensors, when applied to the shipments, enable a dramatically higher fidelity (over 10 times) of data to be used to illuminate what is occurring on each shipment. The types of analysis that personnel performed was encoded into a custom digital agent that looks for events such as the separation of units in a shipment, the overdwelling of shipments, the opening of boxes prior to destination, and unexpected delays in communications from the IoT devices. The agents raise exceptions that require human action when it detects these events. This automated analysis by digital agents optimized the team functions allowing them to truly manage by exception, spend more time working on resolving issues, all the while leaving the analysis of when issues occur to the CargoSense digital agents.

This solution included:

• Digital Twins
• Digital Agents

Data Center Operator

A data center operator needed to systematically track inbound delivery of heavy haul truck loads used in the construction of new data centers. These loads include items such as chiller systems, backup generators, and power management systems. Many of these items are single quantity orders but span multiple heavy haul loads. A further complicating factor is the shipment leave from vendor locations across the globe. A solution was needed to help mark as delivered full unit quantities in their SAP system and help in identifying deliveries where damage occurred during shipment.

The core solution includes a custom web-based SaaS service that suppliers access to schedule the shipments of PO demand lines and identify which loads include components from each SAP demand line. This creates the foundation of the digital twin for each demand line and shipment. The supplier requests IoT gateway kits to be delivered to them that they place on each load. CargoSense's patented QR Sensors are included on the IoT gateway kits with a custom magnetic mount which streamlines applying the devices to each load, using nothing other than a standard smartphone camera and browser. The QR Sensor is scanned at origin and destination and the IoT GPS data, along with temperatures and humidity data, is used to build the digital twin of the shipment load.

The digital agents for this solution ensure that each load meets the required security constraints (only dwelling at secure locations, never stopped for more than a certain time, etc) and environmental constraints, such as condensing humidity, throughout the journey. The agents also track all loads that compose a single unit quantity and update the SAP system in real time as the shipments are delivered. The use of these digital agents dramatically reduces the amount of manpower needed by the data center operator to track the billions of dollars of in-transit annual inventory they receive and optimize build times of new data centers.

This solution included:

• Digital Twins
• Digital Agents