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Supply chain soft spots dashboard

In this section:

You can use the Supply chain soft spots dashboard to identify “soft spots” in your supply chain - locations where critical excursions occur.

Inefficiencies in the supply chain, such as critical temperature excursions, come with a significant cost for pharmaceutical companies. Supporting deviations requires manual effort, increases time to release the product, eventually increasing the cost of capital, and possibly resulting in drug shortages and/ or loss of product.

How can we reduce critical excursions and other inefficiencies in the supply chain? By combining data that's already available with 3rd party data sources to provide a product which gives our customers actionable insights for prevention purposes?

Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager for a product demo and pricing of the Supply chain soft spots dashboard.

This user guide is intended for users of the Supply chain soft spots dashboard, whether they are getting started or want to make sure they get the most out of it.

If you have any questions or feedback on this user guide or the Supply chain soft spots dashboard, contact your Customer Success Manager.

The Supply chain soft spots dashboard is an interactive dashboard in Power BI tool created using historical data gathered from Controlant’s loggers and data from the Supply Chain Monitoring (SCM) system. The loggers monitor and gather temperature and location information throughout the duration of all shipments sent around the world by the organization and the SCM contains the master data for the shipments, such as origin, destination, transportation mode, and much more. The Supply chain soft spots dashboard contains information about shipments that are closed.

Using exploratory analytics reports

Using an exploratory analytics report like this one is different from a regular report where the take-away from each visual is either explained or obvious from context.

Exploratory analytics reports allow the users to ask their own questions and explore the data for questions, answers, and curiosities. The material poses questions that might be of interest to people in various positions and guides the user on how to find the answers in the report. This is by no means an extensive list of all possible questions, but the goal is to inspire the users to ask more questions and explore the data for the answers.

  • The report will by default include all shipments delivered since 1 January 2023.

  • Shipments that have been in shipping status for more than 150 days are excluded from analysis. These shipments may have other issues, such as loggers being lost, that could skew the analysis.

  • In cases where multiple shipments have the same shipment reference, only the newest shipment will be included in the data. This is due to a an issue in the underlying infrastructure that will be fixed in a future release.

  • Only excursions that are at or above the excursion severity threshold, i.e. excursions that require manual inspection are included.

    Example: Shipment xyz only has excursions of severity low, but the threshold for manual inspection is high, so the shipment will not appear as having an excursion in the report.

  • Loggers only send out location data on wake up. This means that if the logger is on a 1 hour wake-up interval we will get hourly locations, but if the logger is on a 24 hour wakeup interval we only get one location per day. This means we are more likely to miss points of interests on shipments with long intervals. This also means that in some cases we will only capture the outbound or inbound airport or harbor.

  • For the same reason as above we might also miss some origin and destinations. When a shipment is on the way to a point of interest, but we never got a ping at an origin location the shipment will be categorized as coming from “Unknown“. It is most likely coming from the origin, but we cannot verify. In the same manner we may not receive a ping at the destination, so the final leg of shipment will be going to “Unknown“.

  • Since loggers only send location data on wakeups we will not always be able to precisely identify an excursion with a location, but we will place the excursion at the closest location by time.

  • The accuracy of the loggers can also affect where we display the location. In areas with bad signal the accuracy can be quite low, but in most cases airports and harbors as well as customer locations near major cities have good accuracy (down to meters).

  • Some customers have multiple overlapping locations (origins and destination) and often with very similar names. In these cases we have grouped the multiple locations into one location in maps. The location name with most shipments is used as the name for the entire group.

  • While shipments are on planes and in flight mode, they do not send us location information. This means that excursions happening during flight will be mapped to the nearest location ping, which in most cases is the departing airport or the arriving airport. In the report these will be categorized as “En route“ because due to their timestamp they most likely happened en route.

  • Due to a limitation in the third party data we are using to map countries, shipment locations in South Africa, Mozambique and Gaza and the West Bank are not correctly mapped and will appear as “Others“ in country filters. This will be fixed in a future release.

  • A few shipments in international waters are also categorized as being in the country “Other“.

  • The directory of locations in this data model is built on Open Street Map data.

  • Shipments marked as On-Site-Monitoring shipments are excluded from analysis as they are stationary shipments.

Controlant Analytics dashboards are in constant development in collaboration with customers and in alignment with user requirement specifications. Pages with the most requested information have been prioritized in the development process.

Requesting access

To get access to dashboard, do the following:

  1. Contact your Customer Success Manager.

    Include details on which dashboard you want to access.

  2. When you have been registered, you will receive an activation email from noreply@controlant.com.

    The email contains a link to verify that the email address is active.

    Note

    Verification emails could go to spam folders or be blocked by company email security firewalls. If this happens, please get in touch with your Controlant contact.

  3. Click the link.

    In a browser, a page appears, confirming your email has been verified.