April/May 2008

 

If you thought US-based Savi was only involved in container tracking, think again. It also provides a range of software for managing the data gathered from wireless monitoring, and integrating it with enterprise systems. Both government and commercial organisations use it.

The company has just released version 5.0 of SmartChain, its flagship product for this market. It is said to offer improved end-to-end visibility, efficiency and business process monitoring and control. We're not clear exactly which features have been updated, but the process took 18 months, which implies a fairly comprehensive overhaul.

SmartChain is said to be able to process data from any standards-based automatic identification and data collection (AIDC) technology, which includes barcodes, sensors, passive or active radio frequency identification systems, and cellular or satellite communications system.

Alerts of supply chain events and exceptions can be transmitted to users automatically in a highly secured environment via the Internet, a mobile phone or a PDA.

 

The base SmartChain application provides a platform for a variety of related Savi products such as its asset management application and consignment management application.