A supply and distribution chain can refer to a system or group of entities, activities, information, and/or assets involved in the delivery of products or services from a supplier to a customer. Activities can involve some transformation of raw materials or data into a finished product or service that can ultimately be delivered or otherwise provided to an end user. The chain can exist within a single entity or across various business entities within, e.g., a particular product or service industry.
Modern channels of trade, including international supply and distribution chains, are often highly complex, span thousands of miles and multiple transportation modes and convey valuable goods from sources to destinations all over the world. A typical supply and distribution chain often begins at a manufacturing plant, where goods are fabricated and loaded into shipping containers for transportation by truck or train to a sea port. At the port, the shipping containers are loaded onto ships and transported across various bodies of water. Once they reach their destination, the ships are unloaded, and the shipping containers again are shipped over land by truck or train to one or more rail yards, and then to distribution centers. The goods are then typically broken up into smaller lots, perhaps into separate pallets or boxes and loaded onto trucks for their final destinations, which are often retail stores, customer locations, or other manufacturing plants.
Currently, expensive and labor-intensive tracking systems exist for identifying and locating goods in such chains. However, these systems fail to offer end-to-end transit operation optimization and require excessive human intervention and maintenance, severely diminishing their effectiveness. Various conventional asset tracking systems are able to cover only portions of a chain, and typically handle many functions as completely independent events without communication (and with human operators). For example, fulfillment may be handled independently of supplier payments, or even order management. In addition, many dates are manually entered, tracked and changed according to the expected delivery status of the product ordered. This is a very costly and time consuming task as the sequence of information, products, and currency can change depending upon the needs of the specific customers, suppliers and logistics providers that are using the network. Suppliers and customers often find themselves paying higher prices, being short of products in times of high demand, forecasting needs inaccurately, and creating slow moving inventories because these legacy systems and methods do not have the resources or time to manage their supply and distribution chain properly. There is a need for an autonomous supply and distribution chain management system that can provide detailed information about each asset and how it can function interactively with the other assets in the supply chain, and optimizes transit operations based on the asset compatibilities and various constraints.