Pinpoint Bottlenecks WIP
You can use Pinpoint Bottlenecks to identify the worst performing lanes and specific points of interest in your supply chain where shipments have excessive lead time and high lead time variability.
Inefficiencies in the supply chain, such as prolonged lead times and bottlenecks, result in significant challenges for pharmaceutical companies. These delays can disrupt production schedules, extend time-to-market, and increase operational costs, ultimately impacting patient access to critical medicines.
You can use Pinpoint Bottlenecks to address these inefficiencies, with the initial goal of reducing lead times and lead time variability by at least 20%. By leveraging and enhancing the data already generated by Controlant’s devices we aim to identify the root causes of delays and pinpoint where bottlenecks are occurring in the supply chain. Armed with this insight, our customers can implement effective solutions, such as optimizing inventory levels, reconfiguring workflows, or collaborating with alternative suppliers. If these strategies are implemented successfully, simulations suggest that our customers could achieve significant cost savings (was +8XROI), along with improved product availability, enhanced efficiency, and stronger resilience in their supply chain operations.
This user guide is intended for users of Pinpoint Bottlenecks, whether they are getting started or want to make sure they get the most out of it.
If you have any questions or feedback on this user guide or Pinpoint Bottlenecks, contact your Customer Success Manager.
Pinpoint Bottlenecks is an interactive dashboard in Power BI created using historical data gathered from Controlant’s devices and data from Supply Chain Monitoring (SCM) system. The devices monitor and gather temperature and location information throughout the duration of all shipments sent around the world by the organization and the SCM contains the master data for the shipments, such as origin, destination, transportation mode, and much more. Pinpoint Bottlenecks is based on historical data from shipments that have the 'Closed' status in SCM.
Using exploratory analytics reports
Using an exploratory analytics report like this one is different from a regular report where the take-away from each visual is either explained or obvious from context.
Exploratory analytics reports allow the users to ask their own questions and explore the data for questions, answers, and curiosities. The material poses questions that might be of interest to people in various positions and guides the user on how to find the answers in the report. This is by no means an extensive list of all possible questions, but the goal is to inspire the users to ask more questions and explore the data for the answers.
The report will by default include data from all shipments delivered since July 2022, depending on availability.
Shipments that have been in shipping state for more than 150 days have been excluded from analysis. These shipments may have other issues, such as devices being lost, that could skew the analysis.
In cases where multiple shipments have the same shipment reference, only the newest shipment will be included in the data.
Devices only send out location data on wake-up. This means that if the device is on a 1 hour wake-up interval we will get hourly locations, but if the device is on a 24 hour wake-up interval we only get one location per day. This means we are more likely to miss points of interests on shipments with long intervals. This also means that in some cases we will only capture the outbound or inbound airport or harbor.
In some cases, we do not receive a geolocation from a device at the origin and/or destination sites. To ensure accurate route construction, we rely on data from SCM for origin and destination information. As a result, all shipments are assigned to their origin and destination as provided by the customer. The timestamps are determined by the
shipped_datetimeand departed event for the origin, and the arrival event anddelivered_datetimefor the destination.Since devices only send location data on wake-ups we will not always be able to precisely identify an excursion with a location, but we will place the excursion at the closest location by time.
The accuracy of the devices can also affect where we display the location. In areas with low connectivity the accuracy can be quite low, but in most cases airports and harbors as well as customer locations near major cities have good accuracy (down to meters).
Some customers have multiple overlapping locations (origins and destination) and often with very similar names. In these cases we have grouped the multiple locations into one location in maps. The location name with most shipments is used as the name for the entire group. Note that the original origin/destination information will not be lost as it is part of the shipment.
Due to a limitation in the third party data we are using to map countries, shipment locations in South Africa, Mozambique and Gaza and the West Bank are not correctly mapped and will appear as “Others“ in country filters. This will be fixed in a future release.
A few shipments in international waters are also categorized as being in the country “Other“.
Split shipments are defined as shipments where two device geopings, at least 100 km apart, result in a calculated speed of over 2,000 km/h. These shipments are excluded from the report to prevent visualization conflicts due to parts traveling through POIs separately.
Outliers are data points that are very different from the rest. We use a method called 'standard deviation' to identify them. If a data point is extremely far from the average—specifically, more than 4 times the typical range (4 sigma) - we call it an outlier.
The directory of locations in the underlying data model is built on Open Street Map data.
Requesting access
To get access to dashboard, do the following:
Contact your Customer Success Manager.
Include details on which dashboard you want to access.
When you have been registered, you will receive an activation email from
.The email contains a link to verify that the email address is active.
Note
Verification emails may go to spam folders or be blocked by company email security firewalls. If this happens, please get in touch with your Controlant contact.
Click the link.
In a browser, a page appears, confirming your email has been verified.