New Wave Company Update: Scout Co-Founder provides his view on the Internet of Things by Jon Hansen

Following up on my previous post in which Freightos CEO Zvi Schreiber provided his take on the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Things and Humans (IoTH), we also solicited feedback from another of our New Wave companies.  I am referring to Year in The Life co-winner Scout RFP.

Here is what Scout Co-Founder Andrew Durlak had to say when I posed the question what are your thoughts regarding the Internet of Things;

The Internet of Things has potential to push supply chains down the road to status-checking, and even control of real world assets.  How great would it be if a manufacturing lathe knew who supplied its cutting tools, tracked wear and maintenance over time, and submitted that information to the purchasing group the next time a tooling RFP came up?  Critical data could be used to make informed decisions much quicker, giving companies that embrace automation a competitive advantage.

Imagine an environment in which nearly all devices and physical assets at your company are sending and receiving data in real-time (even with your suppliers), and you are still using spreadsheets and email to run your sourcing?  The Internet of Things will produce a massive amount of data points – enabling organizations to move much faster, and sourcing will need to increase the pace to keep up. Unfortunately, a lot of companies haven’t automated more basic functions, such as running bid requests and RFPs.  They are still doing it through e-mail and Word/Excel. The problem is that the sourcing automation tools that have existed have been too difficult and expensive to implement.

Scout’s answer is to provide robust RFX automation with easy-to-use software and to make it easy to implement and inexpensive to run.

Andrew’s response is especially interesting and timely, given the fact that just today a new white paper titled “Are Spreadsheets Sabotaging Your Supply Chain?” was just released through Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

Check out our new Internet of Things (and Humans) Supply Chain section for previous posts in this series.

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