The Aeris Fusion IoT Network is the only cellular IoT network that provides visibility and control over your entire connected operation — globally and at scale.
Vice president, European market development
Mohsen Mohseninia, Vice president, European market development at Aeris, sat down with Warehouse & Logistics News to talk about how Aeris’ technology can benefit warehouses.
Can you give us a brief overview of Aeris, and your services?
Aeris is an IoT services provider. At Aeris, we provide future-proven cellular connectivity solutions with global coverage to help businesses who are reliant on IOT solutions for their success, amongst which are logistics and supply chain managers.
What industries does Aeris serve?
We currently have customers in industries ranging from logistics and transport to health, energy and utilities, retail, finance and automotive.
How does Aeris IoT connectivity enable smart cold chain management?
What we have seen from customers is that the key requirement for a successful cold chain and an asset management solution is the ability to provide quality of service and superior coverage. Being able to track the environmental changes an asset goes through, from origins to destination, is becoming more important. If you are shipping chicken, for example, it is important to understand what environmental changes the pallet that contains the chicken has gone through, how hygienic it has been, what the variation in the temperature has been. All of that is real time data that needs to be collected and then transmitted to an application that can apply rules and logic to it and then flag things that are not appropriate. If you don’t have the ability to transmit that data in real time effectively, then the whole process would be handicapped. That’s what we provide. We provide the ability to get the data from the source to the destination securely and reliably and cost-effectively.
With this in mind, how cost-effective is Aeris’ IoT cold chain monitoring system?
I think we are the most cost-effective solution in the market if you consider the entire cost associated with delivering your service, rather than what is it per megabite. Most customers try to buy the cheapest service on a per megabite basis. They don’t take into consideration all the support organisations they need to have to be able to answer their customers’ needs because the service is not working, for example.
What are the benefits to warehouses of Aeris’ IoT infrastructure?
With LTE-M, or 4G narrowband, we provide better indoor coverage very cost effectively. For example, RM2 who launched the smart reusable pallet revolution by embedding autonomous IoT sensor technology in its logistically optimized, hygienic BLOCKPal™ composite pallets. IoT sensor data are transmitted to the cloud via cellular networks, making visible the pallet’s location and condition both indoors and in transit. the Company’s cloud-based supply chain intelligence platform – captures and contextualizes location, temperature, shock, and event data, giving customers end-to-end supply chain visibility and clear, actionable insights in real time.
That quality of service we provide is fundamental to the success of their business because their business is not about the cost of a pallet but they provide pallets as a service. Their business model is not about paying for the pallet but paying for the work that a pallet does. If it moves from A to B, then there is a charge. While it is sitting in point A doing nothing, there is no charge for it. So it becomes Pallet as a service. They manage all the life cycle of their pallets utilising our Fusion IOT Network.
How can Aeris help warehouse and logistics businesses reduce waste?
One of the biggest wastes that exists is loss of pallets, or goods or assets. Through our connectivity we can help them locate where those assets are and recover them. As a result, there will be less waste. Coupled with machine learnings and analytics, we can help customers to optimise their distribution and through that optimisation reduce waste.
How does Aeris’ IoT connectivity make businesses future proof?
Through our eSIM, which is a SIM that has got multiple profiles on it, we can provide services that can protect the customer over a 5-10 year period. The new battery-driven 4G devices are expected to be in the field for 10 years. So we need to provide the customers with a service, and to provide the assurance that service will be available to them for the duration. So through our interactions with our cellular network providers, through our eSIM, through our multi-carrier solution we have not let any customers down yet.
What operational support does Aeris provide to its customers?
We pride ourselves in providing the best support for our customers when it comes to their devices and their business in terms of our response time, our resolution time, the knowledge our people carry, the availability of the real time information for them to be able to diagnose problems, resolve problems and move forward. We also provide customers with a whole set of best practices for how to configure their devices, how their devices should be better tuned and optimised to allow for better use of networks and services to avoid downtime and to avoid device level problems.
With IoT becoming a more important factor within the logistics and warehousing sector, it is instructive to hear from an expert in IoT and its influence on every sector from retail to health. Our thanks to Mohsen for sharing his valuable time and expertise with WLN. It was great to catch up and learn about how IoT can make logistics a smoother, more efficient industry.
Aeris
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