Spring '22 release notes | Avery Dennison

March 23, 2022: new features added to the atma.io connected product cloud, which will transform how brands meet net-zero targets and reduce waste across the supply chain.

Top 5 Features

1. Keep better track of your inventory throughout the supply chain with Global Inventory Trace and Dwell-Time Callouts

What's new?

Global Inventory Trace, introduced to track inventory at SKU and Purchase Order Level along the supply chain. This gives you precise information on how your inventory is distributed across the entire supply chain, broken down by type of location (e.g. factories, warehouses, stores). In addition, we now create Callouts* for items which are located at a particular site for longer than expected and for items that might be close to perishing or are likely to miss their next delivery destination.

*Callouts are alerts/warnings to indicate that some items might need your attention.

Problem solved / use cases?

It is a burning need of producers and retailers to know how their inventory is dispersed across the supply chain, as well as having the ability to track purchase orders from site to site, in order to get a handle on delays and perished stock. Having actionable insights with answers to these questions can significantly help you with stock optimization and waste/cost reduction.

How does it work?

atma.io Hub has one ‘card’ for each site type (e.g. factories, warehouses, stores) that shows the number of items located at the corresponding site type, number of callouts per site, and the number of items in transit to and from that site.

Callouts about items for which an anomaly was detected, either the dwell-time was too long or a suspicious event sequence occurred, are displayed below the cards.

Both sites and callouts can be filtered by PO Number and SKU. Once filtered, this data can be exported for further use.

2. React faster to irregularities in your supply chain with Anomaly Callouts

What's new?

Anomaly Callouts are introduced to indicate suspicious activities happening within your inventory. Callouts point to items that may possibly be counterfeit or that have traversed along the supply chain in “unexpected” ways.

Problem solved / use cases?

While managing millions or even billions of items, it can be hard to notice problematic situations that can lead to supply chain inefficiency, increased waste, or undetected counterfeit items. Anomaly Callouts warn you so you can act on time and mitigate such risks.

How does it work?

To identify irregularities, atma.io analyzes supply chain data on various levels. That includes combining data for processing times, transfer times between sites, and item status transitions. atma.io then applies an ensemble of different heuristics and machine learning algorithms on that data to identify patterns and predict potential outcomes. If an event (associated with an item) is marked as an “anomaly”, a callout in the Hub is created alerting you to inspect the anomaly and take action.

When an item is selected, a trace of events (i.e. detailed traceability journey) for that item is displayed and events that were marked as “anomaly” are highlighted.

3. Gain sustainability insights into your supply chain with Sustainability Facility Assessments and Expiration Callouts

What's new?

atma.io now also manages Manufacturing Sustainability Scores to get a full 360-degree, central view on your suppliers. For this release, we have partnered up with Higg to include data from the Facility Environmental Module. In addition, Callouts are triggered to keep track of sustainability assessment expiration dates for manufacturers in your supply chain. But it does not stop there: Each item produced at a specific manufacturing site will inherit the Sustainability Scores valid at the moment in time of production - giving you a life-long, immutable record for the conditions under which an item was produced.

Problem solved / use cases?

Consumers and regulators expect brands to keep sustainability front and center, and it is the right thing to do. Providing accurate sustainability insights to all stakeholders is a challenge with a dispersed supply chain. Keeping track of assessments and scores across all suppliers, having them available at an item level, and being able to share them with relevant stakeholders and consumers is key in demonstrating sustainability.

How does it work?

Sustainability assessments can be added and managed for each appropriate site.

4. Monitor the progress of purchase orders and ensure the proof of provenance for associated inventory with Purchase Order Tracking

What's new?

Purchase Order Tracking is introduced to help you automate purchase order management. You can create purchase orders, associate ordered items, create and export packing lists, and print carton labels.

Problem solved / use cases?

Tracking and managing large purchase orders, registering items on the production line, creating shipping lists, and printing carton labels when done manually requires a lot of time and can be very error-prone. Keeping the same standards across dozens or even hundreds of manufacturing sites, and ensuring that production is not done through unauthorized subcontractors, brings even more strain to the job. By automating this process with atma.io, you can save time, create efficiencies, reduce errors, and increase traceability.

How does it work?

The atma.io Hub now features a list of all current purchase orders, their states, and the summary of individual items within the purchase orders.

By selecting one purchase order from the table, you get access to its full details. Individual items can be added to the purchase order, be activated, and shipped. There is also an order fulfillment state that keeps track of the progress of a purchase order. Further, you can mark it as confirm/complete, which then enables export functionalities. You can download various documents like summary packing lists, item-based packing lists, and shipping carton labels.

5. Create unique and memorable interactions and get deeper insights with Consumer Experience Gallery, Designer, and Analytics

What's new?

The Consumer Experience Gallery now holds all of your templates and previously used experiences. You can easily browse through to find the experience you need, create a new experience from a template, and use the updated Consumer Experience Designer to further customize your designs. Once your experiences are live you can get granular insights into how consumers engage with your products with deeper Consumer Experience analytics.

Problem solved / use cases?

Enabling consumers to directly engage with your physical product through unique digital experiences, and communicating with them, your sustainability credentials with verified data can help deepen the connection between consumers and physical items, as well as gain their loyalty and trust. Evaluating the success of your campaigns based on accurate, empirical data and being able to track how users interact with the experiences enables you to make better and more relevant experiences geared towards your consumers.

How does it work?

Consumer Experience Gallery holds all your previously used experiences. Once you find the experience you wish to reuse, you can edit it with the updated Consumer Experience Designer and preview it in the browser.

If you need more inspiration, you can use one of the experiences from the template gallery and customize them further with the Consumer Experience Designer.

Once your experiences are live, and consumers start interacting with them, you can keep track of the overall statistics and gain deeper insights into consumer actions with ‘Interact Analytics’ and ‘Consumer Experience Analytics’.

Additional improvements:

You can now stop worrying about where all your inventory is and enjoy the benefits of our connected product cloud, which gives you real-time inventory insights at a glance, with our newly added ‘Count Analytics’.
Tap dancing may not be your cup of tea, but tapping NFC tags or scanning QR codes (GS1 Digital Link or custom schemes), may be your favorite. Our ‘Association’ front-end application now supports all three: Time to start your happy dance.
We realized that the redirect setup was unnecessarily complicated. Sorry about that, we're humans, we learn. Now, you do not need two PhDs to configure a consumer redirect, it is a lot easier with tags and templates.
Constructive feedback is gold. We kept you in the dark for long enough. When you upload product master data we will tell you if you did something wrong, so you don’t have to sweat about it. Also, you admins out there can now manage attribute schema right in the Hub. Feedback - check! Flexibility - check! Success - guaranteed!
Reporting services learned to play nicely with LOT/batch numbers and expiration dates. “Cheers,” says every food industry customer we ever spoke to.
Shipping, Receiving, Transformation, and Association front-end applications work better, faster and you can configure them more easily. We try to keep up with your increased productivity.
We have further improved the usability, scalability, and performance of the entire backend with ‘Transfer’, ‘Count’, and ‘Trace’ modules leading the way. Again, you are flying, we’re your wing-women and -men.
Talking to customer support is eeeeeeeverybody’s favorite thing. So don't be mad at us that you no longer have to call them to set-up API keys for your integrations. Admins can create the API keys by themselves right from the atma.io Hub. But you can still call to say hello, we love hearing from you.
You know how the sequel can be worse than the original? Not with us! Transfer API v2 is more flexible and introduces carton audit reason codes, Advance Shipping Notice support, and Transfer analytics over API.

If you have any further questions about the Spring 22 release, please reach out - we love to hear from you!