IoT & Smart Pallets

There´s no doubt that smart machines, combined with the industrial IoT, are revolutionizing the manufacturing process via big data. Factories and plants using internet of things are more productive, efficient and effective than non-connected plants.   Due to this, Lora Alliance, the leading technology alliance for the IoT, in collaboration with Machina research, launched its first IoT challenge last July. Source The Lora Alliance
The LoRa Alliance, welcomed revolutionary IoT solutions in the categories of "Supply Chain Optimization", "Manufacturing", "Building Automation", "Smart City", "Security", "Connected Home", "Standardization", and "Healthcare". The challenge was a huge success! With more than 2000 companies, from 150 different countries, participating. But today, we would like to talk about one of the finalist´s ideas, Palletech. Palletech is an American company, specialized in helping companies track their products ‘shipments. They work directly with pallet providers to create smart, connected pallets, allowing companies to better track their merchandise. Source Palletech
Their idea was to place LoRa-based sensors inside the central plank of the pallet, to collect information about temperature, location, humidity, shock, time etc. Tracking all these data in real-time improves inventory management, condition monitoring, asset tracking and security. Pallet poolers reserve up to 15% of their sales price ($10Bn per year) for manual tracking of their pallets. The value of lost and counterfeited cargo in pharma alone is worth $60Bn. $45Bn of sales are generated from fake automotive parts around the globe because of poor tracking of cargo. Currently, labels and RFIDs are used, but both are limited to scanning locations and require large infrastructure investments. With this idea, companies will have an environment where all information is available, from within the plant floor and along the supply chain, which would mean substantial savings and enhance their supply chain!   Manufacturing companies are using IoT to automate their production. It seems that tracking and collecting real time data related with their products would be one of the principal activities of future manufacturers. Do you remember our challenge about monitoring the charge status of lead batteries in photovoltaic systems? Read the challenge That was a volunteering challenge and had some good participation from different countries around the globe and we had 2 winners! The electronic cards that are being prototyped now are based on solutions used to monitor the battery in model aircraft and drones and the cost is quite low (remember the lead battery was about 150 USD / system so one of the criteria for winners was to bring a very low cost solution). Do you like IoT? Would you like to help companies reinvent their operations through IoT? Check out our challenges!