A few months ago, we shared part I of our 2020 update focusing on our market approach and MODsense. In part II we would like to briefly address our progress and views related to MODsight and MODlink activities. In case you missed part I, you can find it here!
MODsight
MODsight is all about advanced and predictive analytics based on data acquired by MODsense and augmented with additional data. A good example is with the smart packaging selector, we introduced last year (read all about it here). We started to pilot this approach with interested customers in 2019 and are evolving the application ever since.
Bringing in our capabilities and fully leveraging collected data usually follows in a second stage of a customer engagement, in the form of a dedicated project or general features for our MODsight software modules, later benefiting a large part of our user base. Such general MODsight features, for example dynamic shipment analytics reports or lead time estimates, are continuously expanded.
It is great to see that our customers understand the value of these additional levels of insight and ask us to help them beyond just monitoring. This is also where our network of consulting and implementation partners really helps, as it provides us the flexibility to decide how we engage in a specific follow-up project and we can combine forces with our experienced partners when it comes to showing our customer the full benefits of supply chain visibility and control across their organization.
MODlink
Under the label MODlink, we summarize a series of integration and data management options we support to maximally leverage the data we collect with MODsense and share derived insights in a trusted way either back into our customer’s logistics processes or to other supply chain stakeholders.
While the blockchain-hype cooled off to a reasonable level in the past year, the industry understood and validated the possibilities of blockchain technologies to solve the underlying challenges of exchanging trusted data in a well-governed, cross-supply setup with trusted access permissions. This is where Modum is leading the industry in creating trusted events for supply chain process automation and interaction with final product recipients and is therefore invited to participate in the solution finding. Thanks to our the relationship-based ecosystem, we are called for more and more project opportunities with global players, which are about leveraging the benefits of adding blockchain-secured data from our MODsense system into the leading systems of brand owners and their distribution partners.
A recent example is our engagement in the Poseidon network, a program building a viable way to distributing pharmaceutical products more and more by seafreight instead of airfreight. This is a network of qualified and integrated providers with the need of a secure planning platform for the whole network. This is particularly interesting in the context of the COVID-19 vaccine distribution challenge, where an unprecedented amount of vaccines needs to be distributed while airfreight capacities suffered from the collapse of air travel.
It is great to see how Modum can bring pharma brand owners and distributors to the same table in order to facilitate true end-to-end monitoring of their products and to enable process automation and optimization across their full supply chain.
In summary, the challenges of trusted event-based supply chain optimization and automation we address with MODsight and MODlink are often more complex and customer specific. As we closely work with our customers, it is great to see emerging patterns and problems that allow us to build standard software modules over time – increasing the value Modum can provide even further. And the fact that the extraordinary and globally impactful events in 2020 are bringing global supply chain actors to one (albeit virtual) table to talk about supply chain resilience even more, only will act a as a catalyst to educate about AI and blockchain technologies and generate the collaborative spirit to start tackling such use cases more and more.
Stay healthy and tuned for an exciting 2021!
Simon Dössegger
CEO Modum
