BrazilHorváth & Partners partners with Swiss tech scale-up Modum
Horváth & Partners has agreed a partnership with Modum, a Swiss scale-up that uses emerging technologies to improve supply chain management.
According to Kai Gindner, a leader at Horváth & Partners in Switzerland, and Simon Dössegger the CEO of Modum, the tie-up enables both companies to expand their services, while better positioning them to offer their clients a more integral offering.
Using technologies including process automation, artificial intelligence, internet of things and blockchain, Modum helps its clients improve visibility of nodes and events in their supply chain. This in turn increases transparency in the flow of goods, which enables the optimisation of sub-optimal cases such as high error risk, long process times, or poor product safety.
“Modum enables data driven steering of supply chains, based on measurement and transmission of environmental condition and location data with smart sensors,” explained Dössegger. “Clients can use real-time data to analyse data on the fly in order to gain a better understanding in their supply chain, drive performance improvement and recognise future trends.”
Succes in pharma
The firm’s first major success was in the pharmaceuticals segment. The transport of pharma products requires a strong focus on quality control – some medicines for instance require temperature-control (20% of such products are damaged every year in the supply chain due to the complexity of temperature-cooling), while medical devices are often susceptible to shock and tilt.
Developed in collaboration with Modum and SAP, Swiss Post today continuously monitors the temperatures of medicinal and pharmaceutical products while in transit, which may be over thousands of kilometres, up to the moment they are handed over to the customer. Modum’s solution MODSense is placed inside a package and programmed with the permitted temperature range for the content of that package. Sensors transmit data to a blockchain database, which stores the information.
This has helped Swiss Post consolidate its frontrunning role in the transport of medicinal products, because “not many European logistics companies are active in this segment, as the [regulatory] requirements have become so strict,” said Thomas Wälchli, who is head of Business Development and Industry Management at PostLogistics, the logistics division of Swiss Post.
More use cases
With a range of similar solutions, Modum is expanding its footprint to areas including perishable foods and beverages and malleable construction materials, similarly transport of these products is governed by strict regulations and therefore continuous monitoring of the supply chain is key.
Part of Horváth & Partners’ ecosystem, and its broader network within Cordence Worldwide, Modum will be able to tap into a huge client base, in the DACH region and beyond. Meanwhile, the scale-up will benefit from the supply chain expertise of Horváth & Partners.
“We are confident that partnering with Horváth & Partners enables us to give our customers even more holistic support on how to optimise their value chains, and on how they can make their supply chain fit for the 21st century market,” said Dössegger.
Gindner: “This partnership offers customers a truly value-adding offering to level up their supply chain steering capabilities – from idea to implementation. We are now able to offer our customers end-to-end connectivity of ecosystem partners, complete supply chain network transparency and reliable product traceability. Tt is therefore a perfect fit for us.”
A recent report from PA Consulting found digital supply chains hold an exciting promise for supply chain leaders. Powered by new ways to harness data and automation, organisations can extract greater efficiencies, drive top-line growth, reduce risk, act with increased agility, and gain greater control and visibility of the end-to-end supply chain.
