The life geospatial - your breakfast table
You’ve had your lovely shower, cleaned your teeth, now for some nutrition. The table and what you put on it – though goodness knows I don’t actually get to sit at it most mornings – more living at work than working from home it sometimes seems!
Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels
So, what’s spatial about that? Don’t you love your fair-traded wood table, your organic muesli and bananas? This is a spatial supply chain tale – testing the reality, validating your assumptions and the marketing messages, reassuring you of the values – authenticity, fairness, netzero, environmental protection, nutrition, chemical harms, living wage, land rights and more – that inform your purchasing and consumption decisions.
Some of those immediately resonate as “thinking globally, acting locally” and along geospatial lines – land, environment, pollution, food miles for instance. And it feeds into the wider data arena of tracking, tracing, monitoring, measuring and reporting.
What is it, where did it come from, who grew it, processed it or made it, how is it grown, were they paid, what did they use/add, how did it get here, how is it packaged. Just some of the questions consumers do or could ask and companies are or should be concerned about and able to answer. But can they? Authoritatively, with confidence, in accordance with their ESG commitments, CSR compliance and quality management frameworks?
Thinking geospatially and putting a geospatial lens to these challenges helps:
- Document the geography and pedigree of raw materials and ingredients using QR codes and IoT sensors to tag food and goods at source
- Create a “digital twin” of the physical supply chain
- Use EO, AIS and other alternative data to monitor food and other supply chains to inform supply chain managers, financial institutions and government agencies
- Evaluate potential impacts, using EO data for comparison, typically of land use change (forest for your beef and oils, iconic species for your table, tailings dams, water courses for pollution)
- Monitor weather conditions to inform field level intervention, activate alternate supplies, enable hedging
- Remotely monitor critical assets – performance, efficiency, maintenance scheduling
- Take corrective action in near real time – change routes or shippers, detect theft with geofencing – to protect value and mitigate disruption
- Devise impact mitigation – resource, environmental, social, events – for sustainable production and supply
- Identify bottlenecks, dependencies and risks to optimise the supply chain to reduce inventory, human intervention or trans-shipment costs
- Ensure ESG and CSR compliance and other insights from cradle to table (‘food miles’)
- Unit and lot level product data to reduce spoilage, contamination, waste and delay
- Build consumer trust and secure your brand through quality, safety and equity
- Unlock data from your existing systems and integrate supply chain data with other data to drive new insights and opportunities
As Unilever supply chain head Marc Engel said to Bloomberg “It’s all about can I get my raw materials, do I have enough people to run my factories, and can trucks drive across countries to deliver the goods. You can sit and wait around until it happens, but then you’re usually too late.”
In a globalised economy it is very hard for citizens to consume truly wholly locally and even if they could the services on which they otherwise depend are themselves dependent on global supply chains. The currently grounded Ever Given is a timely reminder. As the cost and size of sensors continues to shrink so the opportunity to deliver real value across the supply chain through effective data capture, management and analysis multiplies. Location data is ubiquitous across these data flows, enriching analyses, visualisations and decision making - and commodity prices.
As you take your pew, spare a silent thought for those data-enabled processes as they adapt to the challenge of ‘events dear boy, events’ so that goods flow and needs and expectations are met.