Home Smart 100 2011 Smart-Trace Monitoring System (SMART 100)

Smart-Trace Monitoring System (SMART 100)

0

Show your support for this innovation. Tweet it. Like it on Facebook. Leave a comment.

The following SMART 100 profile and the information it contains is a duplication of content submitted by the applicant during the entry process. As a function of entry, applicants were required to declare that all details are factually correct, do not infringe on another’s intellectual property and are not unlawful, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. Some profiles have been edited for reasons of space and clarity. More about the SMART 100.

Smart-Trace Monitoring System

This innovation initially came to life when…

Inventor Don Richardson was approached by AFGC with a problem that its food industry members were confronting; it had to do with improving and monitoring the refrigerated distribution of perishables — foods and pharma products — during distribution. The industry wanted a more responsive way to ensure their product food safety and automatically evidence same to major retail chains, rather than have goods rejected for failing to comply with the new HACCP food safety regulations being promulgated around the developed countries (OECD). Richardson was then granted patents in numerous OECD countries for its unique business process.

[What does “its” refer to here? The OECD? The innovation (Smart-Trace)? Or the company, which isn’t mentioned here (Ceebron)?]

WHAT & HOW

The purpose of this innovation is to…

The Smart-Trace Solution allows consignor of products transparency of its cold chain condition, in real time, facilitating intervention, to improve waste, freshness, and prevent foodborne illness outbreaks.

It does this by…

Monitoring the temperature of the packaged goods on pallets as they move between the consignor premises and the consignee premises in refrigerated transport — be that road, rail, sea, or air — and in actionable near real time, so that informed corrective actions can be taken before waste is incurred. This is an automated solution involving disposable tags, gateways, and web application.

PURPOSE & BENEFITS

This innovation improves on what came before because…

Its solution is in actionable real time, making the consignor the first to know of any product abuse being incurred by his product prior to reaching and being rejected by a retailer. Currently he is the last to know. Further it places no requirement on the retailer receiving staff, to return or for retailer to install capital equipment to read.

Its various benefits to the customer/end-user include…

Customer is consignor of perishable products (food or pharma) and while benefits accrue to all members of the supply chain by virtue of the new level of performance transparency, customers benefits are: less waste, greater freshness, lower risk to brand.

COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

In the past, this problem was solved by…

Use of returnable data loggers or RFID devices requiring reading equipment along the supply chain. The cost and inconvenience of past solution, was why the industry approached Richardson for an alternate and potentially ‘mainstream’ solution to this massive industry problem. The past solutions were therefore not widely used — and if there was abuse the data loggers would be ‘missing’.

Its predecessors/competitors include…

Partlow recorders, Gemini and many other brands of mechanical and electronic data loggers, RFID TurboTags, iButtons, systems like Intelleflex, Infrared — also chemical based monitors of temperature like 3M MonitorMark, a family of time temperature indicators — but no real-time disposable solutions.

TARGET MARKET

It is made for…

Consignors of all perishable foods, beverages, and temperature-sensitive life science and pharmaceutical products, vaccines, etc. Chilled or frozen, local or export, retail or food service. Consignors are generally the originator of the goods and have product knowledge to make the best judgements of what action to take with specific abused products. In some instances, retailers have own cold chain distribution issues — DCs to Stores — the problem might be just one pallet load of 44 pallets in a trailer. What is quite evident since the work began is that there is much performance variability that until now has been unknown.

DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY

It is available for sale through…

Annual contracts with selected consignor customers (prioritised on basis of value density, relative perishability and size of the specific sector) by way of an ecommerce tag replenishment service, expressed direct to the various dispatching warehouse sites of such large customers.

Our marketing strategy is to…

Target the leading companies in the selected sectors and provide low-cost ‘piloting’ opportunities on their most cold chain challenged operations, and have major retailers encourage their suppliers to enter the continuous improvement cold chain integrity program that minimises their in-store ‘shrink’ (8-10%) and 50% of which is damage done to product via cold chain abuse, usually prior to their acceptance.

SUPPORTING IMAGES

SHOW YOUR SUPPORT…

Voting for the Readers’ Choice Index has concluded, but you can still show your support!

  1. Tweet it: Top left of each page
  2. Trigger a Reaction: Facebook ‘Like’, etc.
  3. Leave a Comment: Anonymous comments excluded*

More about the READERS’ CHOICE INDEX.