Spring '24 release notes

April 16, 2024: new features added to the atma.io connected product cloud, helping brands and factories to create efficiencies in their supply chains and eliminate handling errors.

Summary

With the features released in Spring ‘24, we help factories and brands achieve unparalleled shipping accuracy and timely, transparent order fulfillment while increasing efficiency in factory processes. The highlight features include an intuitive Factory Dashboard for Scan & Pack, a new Supply Chain Map, and a standardized shipping label generator.

Physical products need to be labeled with a digital trigger (QR code, NFC tag, RFID label) to enable tracking of products across the supply chain and to unlock new consumer engagement opportunities. While accurate labeling is critical, it is also a tricky step in the traceability game to ensure that the order is labeled, packed, and shipped completely and without errors before leaving the factory. Although errors like a missing or incorrect label can be corrected downstream in the distribution center (DC) or even in the store, it is much more efficient and cost effective to fix such errors at source.

For factories, accurate outbound shipment also helps eliminate chargeback costs. Whereas for DCs and brands, it significantly reduces the time and resources spent on manual effort downstream to fix labeling errors. In a scenario where a factory sends shipments to multiple DCs for various brands, and these DCs ship to numerous stores across the globe, the overall impact of inaccurate shipment and labeling errors is even bigger downstream. Let’s map out a scenario: Out of all cartons processed at a DC, around 2.5% require manual effort to address labeling errors that could have been fixed at source. It takes workers around three minutes to find and reprint missing, incorrect labels or identify multiple labels. So, for an average DC that handles 600K cartons a quarter, workers could be spending around 750 hours to ensure all items are correctly tagged before being sent further downstream from DC to the store. All this effort could be saved by ensuring accurate labeling and shipping from the factory.

Learn more about the latest platform updates below.

Highlight Features

1. Ship accurate inventory and cut down on chargebacks with the new Factory Dashboard for Scan & Pack

What's new?

Factory Dashboard for Scan & Pack is the new consolidated view of the Scan & Pack solution which allows factories to validate the content of packed cartons against the packing plan to ensure accuracy. These scan results are consolidated in atma.io where they are now presented in a dashboard. This is a critical traceability read point for products leaving the factory.

Problem solved / use cases?

Ensuring traceability relies on products being tagged/labeled correctly with digital IDs like RFID. Factory tagging is the most efficient and cost-effective point in the supply chain. It also brings other benefits like automating the outbound verification process, eliminating charge-backs, reducing the manual effort involved in collecting and organizing data for reporting, and enabling effective communication between brands and factories.

By providing real-time visibility of purchase order status and completion, our Factory Dashboard for Scan & Pack helps factories deliver accurate shipments which leads to accurate inventory in the downstream supply chain, and creates operational efficiency. This also enables better traceability and real-time evaluation of scanning and packing activities to achieve process improvements, helping brands locate the right product at the right place at the right time.

How does it work?

Factory Dashboard for Scan & Pack consolidates the data recorded while products are being packed and visualizes it in a way that allows factory managers to understand the current state of their purchase orders at a glance.

The dashboard shows; a) how many POs are ‘Created’, or ‘In Progress’, b) how many are on time, and most importantly c) how many POs have issues, are delayed, or have cartons with incorrect products packed.

Navigating to the detailed view of any particular purchase order is easy. Simply select it from the list to open the new carton-centric view of the purchase order. There you can see the list of cartons that still have to be packed or have discrepancies with the packing list.

2. Visualize your entire supply chain with the new Supply Chain Map

What's new?

Continuing with our theme of traceability visualization we bring you our new Supply Chain Map - the bird’s eye view of the flow of events for your products from source to store. It gives you an overview of all the links in the chain including the manufacturers and suppliers, along with the certificates and assessments. It also highlights the potential problems, in an intuitive way so you don’t have to look for them in different places.

Problem solved / use cases?

Do you have all it takes to place your products on a certain market? Do you have all the right certificates in all the right places? Are you sure about the origin of your products, all the way to the materials sourcing? Do you know where your products are or where they have been before reaching the current location? Do you have all you may need for DPP compliance? All this without having to work through spreadsheets and sending multiple emails? Getting to these answers is simpler if you have a tool that visualizes the entire supply chain flow for you, so you can easily follow the journey of the products and spot potential weaknesses and issues.

How does it work?

Supply Chain Map harnesses the power of the connected product cloud to visualize all the supply chain events in an interactive, concise, and easy to understand way.

We map your supply chain for you. Easily click through the data. Filter by specific product attributes (like a purchase order) or by individual products in a certain time frame. Expand each site to see additional products and certificate information. Highlight the connections to see how products have traveled through the supply chain. Search for a specific site to see where the products have gone from that site. All at your fingertips.

Look out for the atma.io Fall ‘24 release where we plan on going further upstream from the factory to create a deeper mapping of the raw material data of tier 3 and tier 4 suppliers that will feed into this supply chain map.

3. Generate GS1 compliant Logistic Labels directly through the atma.io Hub

What's new?

You can now generate a logistic label that follows the GS1 standard directly through the atma.io Hub. The generated label can be applied to your shipping unit (like a carton or a pallet). It uniquely identifies that exact unit and provides all relevant information to the various actors in the logistics chain for them to identify the unit and the goods it carries, and enables a smoother receiving process. atma.io also forwards the shipment information digitally to the receiver in a standardized ASN message, which makes it easier to capture the event data necessary for traceability use cases.

Problem solved / use cases?

In atma.io we assign digital identity to every physical product through digital triggers. We do that to be able to capture data for every critical event throughout their lifecycle. Shipping products from one location to another is usually done by packing the smaller items into larger containers; like cartons or pallets. These logistic units, if properly identified can make the event capturing a lot faster and less error-prone.

According to the GS1 guideline: “The GS1 Logistic Label allows users to identify logistic units uniquely so that they can be tracked and traced throughout the supply chain. The only mandatory requirement is that each logistic unit must be identified with a unique serial number, the Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC).”

With the Spring ‘24 release, we added the ability to generate a unique SSCC barcode for each carton and to generate a label that can be printed and applied to the carton with all relevant information.

How does it work?

From the atma.io Origin module (i.e. the Purchase Order management module) you can select the PO and generate a batch of logistic labels for all units within that PO. The label that is generated consists of a unique SSCC barcode, destination site address, source site address, product ID with style, color, and SKU. Different labels are generated for single SKU units and mixed SKU units.

Additional improvements:

We implemented the new replenishment report as part of our inventory solution pack. This report calculates the replenishment needs of every sales floor location based on the target quantity on the sales floor and the available quantity in the backrooms. Products that are not on display or are low on stock are highlighted, so you can proactively replenish them and deliver a positive customer experience. Export functionality for this report is also available in the atma.io Hub.

Another upgrade of our inventory solution is the inventory reconciliation report that compares the inventory counts (snapshots in time) to the target stock and highlights products that should not be in your inventory and the ones that are missing. This helps retail stores and warehouses react faster to discrepancies, uncover potential theft, and avoid overstocking issues.

For the Fall ‘23 release, we announced that we are a PACT conformation solution provider under the Pathfinder v2 framework. With this release, we went one step further by bringing you the PACT Pathfinder product carbon footprint data directly in the atma.io Hub. View and download a detailed breakdown of emissions for a given product.
You can now create and manage multiple product data schemas in the Attribute module. This means that you can have a different set of product fields for different product categories (you can have different product identifier types as well), you can manage the fields for your schemas, and even rename them. It is fully self-service right inside the Hub!
Track & Trace - the flagship functionality of atma.io fleet got a big makeover for this release. Event cards can now be customized to display even more information about each event. You can also filter the events right there in the Hub.
Our well-known and beloved warehouse dashboard got a new version specifically tailored to manual DCs. Manual DCs do not utilize RFID tunnels. The RFID verification process is done on exception handling stations. This new view of the dashboard accommodates the different processes to bring valuable insights into the warehouse operations.

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