Perfect intersection: M2M and the supply chain

The MVNO factor

As we’ve covered in previous issues of Connected Planet and on TelephonyOnline.com (search the site for ‘M2M’), MVNOs and resellers play a key role in the M2M market. Large mobile operators like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have shown they are willing to invest new resources to become go-to providers in the M2M market. But they also lean heavily on specialty network resellers to provide the level of network management and support – not to mention ensuring coverage through agreements with multiple operators – that M2M customers require. M2M specialists also typically have the expertise in-house to sell and support complex vertical applications, like supply chain management.

"Understanding where things are in the supply chain is becoming more and more just a click away," says Macario Namie, senior director of product marketing for M2M reseller Jasper Wireless. Existing technologies such as RFID and low-power radios are essentially M2M devices in their own right, and play a valuable role in today's supply chains, Namie says. "But they are static and highly limiting. Once goods hit the open road, cellular is the only economic means to track them. You can easily lose cargo for days or weeks" without some way of making tracking more pervasive and real-time.

Another M2M network provider, Kore Telematics, supports the LoJack SCI application. Overall, the big trend in supply chain applications, says Kore COO Alex Brisbourne, is the move away from simple track and control applications to more sophisticated solutions where greater contextual data is transmitted to provide much more powerful supply chain and logistics control. For instance, a company shipping beef products might want to monitor and transmit the temperature of its trucks. Pharmaceutical companies have similar environmental issues in the supply chain. Such information can be monitored in route and transmitted in real-time to cut off problems – such as a broken refrigerator car – before they become serious, Brisbourne says.

“At that point, the M2M services required fit a very different kind of profile,” he says. For instance, rather than just affixing a simple tracking unit on a vehicle or train, a more sophisticated measuring and transmission device must be mounted inside a particular shipping container. When the supply chain requirements become more complex the expertise to create such M2M applications become much more specific and specialized as well, he says. “There are times when [our mobile] operator [partners] recognize that a customer has more complicated requirements and we’re more able to manage and fulfill them than they are,” he says. “We’ve gone out of our way to try to build deep, long-term, cooperative relationships with our carrier partners.”

Overall, Kore works with more than 650 different M2M software solution vendors, about 25 to 30 of which are specifically involved in areas of asset management, logistics and supply chain, Brisbourne says. Increasingly, large supply chain consultants – such as IBM Global Services or Accenture – compete for the lead role in M2M supply chain projects. But rarely if ever are traditional supply chain app vendors like SAP or Oracle in the mix, Brisbourne says – at least not yet.