The mounting concerns of counterfeiting, inefficiencies and growing customer and consumer demands across various industry sectors, have compelled the need to collaborate systems’ solutions to ensure a more visible and traceable supply chain process.
Following the successful début of the Zetes showcase in 2012, the leading provider of goods and people identification solutions demonstrated its collaborative supply chain execution suites at the Zetes Supply Chain Showcase 2013 on the 9th, 11th and 12th September in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town.
“In line with local and international trends, the need for a truly collaborative supply chain that meets current day and future challenges of visibility and traceability across multiple borders is imperative.
“This year’s Supply Chain Showcase takes it to the next level by taking our guests on a real-time tour of a simulated supply chain environment where they received first-hand experience of how our collaborative execution suites streamline the identification of goods to optimise efficiencies and ultimately reduce costs,” says Karin Parker executive head of Sales and Marketing.
“Zetes’ execution suites were demonstrated in a chocolate truffle application in the supply chain – from manufacturing and packaging, warehousing, logistics, and transportation right to the customer experience in the retail store,” Parker says.
According to Parker, guests engaged with each process, from production, product identification, distribution to retail, and witnessed how the Zetes technology solutions enable the collaborative supply chain.
“Both emerging and mature technologies were highlighted, such as barcode, voice recognition, RFID, smartcards, and biometrics that result in focussed solutions that optimise the business performance through the supply chain across many market segments,” she adds.
Zetes’ core solutions were developed to solve the challenges of each specific environment in the supply chain. ZetesAtlas provides secure identification and traceability along the packaging line, creating a solid foundation for a collaborative supply chain, while ZetesMedia is a logistics execution suite that efficiently manages all warehouse processes.
For full visibility of the delivery process, ZetesChronos helps manage and execute operational processes linked to deliveries and pick-up services. On the retail front, ZetesAthena is a cost effective in-store mobile management solution that provides easy, cloud-based management of in-store applications.
Parker says that the ‘glue’ that tracks the movement of objects along the supply chain is ZetesOlympus, which acts as a unified repository of data records, interfacing with different sources of information across enterprises to achieve a truly collaborative supply chain where both visibility and traceability goals are achieved.
According to Parker, the capabilities of ZetesOlympus was demonstrated at the event through the deployment of RFID technology, which was used to register the guests, personalise their welcome on the tour, and track and trace them through the supply chain, with a personalised report generated at the end of the tour for each person, showing which execution suites they were most interested in, and which ones they missed out.
“Our Supply Chain Showcase demonstrated that whatever the goods are, be it food, jewellery, pharmaceuticals, clothing or machinery, an efficient supply chain has to determine what happened, when, how, why and by whom, and our execution suites are specifically designed to handle these processes,” concludes Parker.