We live in a society where satisfying our needs or wishes as fast as possible has become the norm. Moreover, the population’s increase, the technologies’ development have all lead to a different lifestyle and to different expectations.
That is why we do most of our shopping online, we expect 24 hour delivery for most of the products we order, and we like constantly having fresh food in our homes. Actually, Thomas Friedman (a renowned American journalist) said that Supply chains could not tolerate even 24 hours of disruption. So if you lose your place in the supply chain because of wild behavior, you could lose a lot. It would be like pouring cement down one of your oil wells.
So are supply chains that critical to our global economy? Do we need better logistics? Should we find more efficient transportation methods? Is the right time to go the extra mile to achieve the results we need and improve our society? If you strongly believe the answers to these questions is affirmative, this article might catch your attention and help you better understand the logistics industry of today.
To better understand how modern communication, digitization, and recent technologies can transform the world we live in and disrupt the logistics industry, it’s time for some quick statistics. Every year, 5 billion shipments are made globally - through air freight containers (using 1 million of these methods) and sea freight containers (with the help of 17 million such containers, to be precise).
SmartContainers, a recent project developed to revolutionize the way shipments are made, is promoting a new way of combining hardware, software, monitoring systems and containers. Especially used for the pharmaceutical and food industry, these containers can maintain the same temperature in the inside (with less than 0.3% deviation). However, it doesn’t stop here - Nico Ros (Co-founder and CTO of SmartContainers) states on the SmartCointainers official website that their vision is to “create a fully autonomous, integrated container based on blockchain technology.“ And here, as you might have expected, things get a lot more interesting!
The ecosystem SmartContainers aims to develop and promote through its products and services has a series of mind-blowing inventions:
The containers we talked about will be using a series of state of the art integrated Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. These IoT chips will be connected to cloud solutions and will facilitate the monitoring of all containers (anywhere in the world)
Through complex mechanisms and integration with blockchain technology, the system will be able to automatically generate the shipping parcel.
The containers will allow a very accurate tracking - a feature that will have both time and resources.
All containers will be able to gather a big data pool of real-life temperature analysis - this permits operators to simulate shipping routes, to eliminate laboratory test and also trial and error tests.
The use of a decentralized solution will lead to a major shift - it will be containers that will actually do several operations (such as invoicing) and not employees.
No electricity required for charging the containers! The cold air can do this job - this means lighter containers and faster handling.
Got questions about the project, the stage it is at and other features it develops? Learn more about SmartCointainers and its ICO at: