As we enter the new year, the Supply Chain Matters blog features our third year 2020 edition of This Week in Supply Chain Management Tech, a brief synopsis of noteworthy supply chain management focused technology news which we believe would be of specific interest to our global-based blog readership.
Included in this edition are highlights of noteworthy announcements and/or developments related to supply chain planning, B2B logistics and transportation technology market spaces: 
Kinaxis and Syncronic
Llamasoft
Loginext
BluJay Solutions and project44
Elemica and Eyefreight
MIT Sloan School Study Focused on Farmer Profitability
Kinaxis and Syncronic Collaborate to Transform Supply Chain Business Processes
Concurrent supply chain planning and response management technology provider Kinaxis announced a partnership with Denmark based supply chain technology consulting firm Syncronic.
This partnership is reportedly focused on assisting supply chain management teams in transforming business processes and integrated supply chain management strategy to help achieve more-timely time-to-value
Syncronic provides more than 30 consultants and nearly 15 years’ experience as a supply chain advisory, design implementation and integrated services firm. The firm’s consultants are noted as the most experienced and specialized within the field of supply chain management in Nordics countries.
Llamasoft Launches Artificial Intelligence Enabled Technology Platform
Supply chain management decision support technology provider Llamasoft, announced the release of this provider’s new artificial intelligence platform termed: llama.ai .
The launch of this platform comes after significant research, collaboration and testing with a number of the company’s early adopter customers. The platform’s purpose is to support rapid decision making, scenario and tradeoff testing for tactical and strategic decisions, coupled with broader access to advanced analysis and operational modeling deployment with both custom or pre-built apps.
Capabilities reportedly include:
Digital Twin – a digital representation of the end-to-end supply chain with an appropriate level of granularity to provide customers the ability to explore options, assess risks and evaluate trade-offs across business functions.
Algorithm Library – purpose-built supply chain algorithms including the ability to add custom algorithms to provide new ways to answer complex questions.
App Studio – designed to develop personalized applications to allow business users to more easily leverage advanced algorithms, analyze specific business questions, view new data insights and assess predictions and recommended actions.
Alibaba Backed Loginext Receives $39 Million in Supplemental Funding
Mumbai India based logistics SaaS provider Loginext has raised $39 million in a new round of investment funding prided by Steadview Capital and Tiger Global Management.
The company has built an end-to-end logistics management platform to help companies in automated order management, route optimization and post delivery processing and analytics. The company reportedly has garnered upwards of 150 customers.
This added round of investment comes three and a half years after the logistics technology provider raised $10 million in seed funding from China based online retail platform provider Alibaba, and mobile payments provider Paytm.
Total capital raised is reportedly $50 million with an estimated market valuation close to $100 million. Proceeds from the added investment are expected to double the company’s workforce in the next 12 months as well as fund acquisitions.
BluJay Solutions Partners with Project44
Retail industry centric supply chain and global trade management software and services provider BluJay Solutions announced a partnership with advanced logistics visibility platform provider project44.
In November 2019, BluJay launched the Freight Market Index, a monthly report providing transportation market intelligence for shippers, carriers, and industry professionals. This index is comprised of an elaborate set of key performance indicators (KPIs) derived from the over $18 billion in annualized freight under management transacting within BluJay’s Global Trade Network.
The partnership reportedly combines BluJay’s multitenant, Cloud based Transportation Management platform with project44’s global multimodal Cloud platform that includes data cleansing and normalization capabilities. This latest partnership is one of many recent announcements involving project44, including a December 2019 announced partnership with SAP SE and the SAP Logistics Business Network. This software provider’s messaging is to deliver a more visible and predictable transportation experience by addressing the industry’s most immediate pain points – pricing, routing, scheduling, tracking, delivery documentation, and payments. It does so through developing applications programming interfaces (API’s) that link disparate systems from various transportation and logistics providers.
Elemica Expands Logistics Footprint with Acquisition of Eyefreight
Manufacturing industry focused B2B technology platform provider Elemica announced the acquisition of Eyefreight, a multi-modal SaaS Transportation Management System (TMS) provider.
The terms of this transaction were not disclosed.
The addition of the TMS capabilities with the Elemica Digital Supply Network will reportedly provide clients a single platform for multi-national shipment optimization, freight settlement, and execution. Eyefreight’s support capabilities span transportation planning, control tower, freight spend analysis and business intelligence capabilities. These capabilities will reportedly leverage a connected network of carriers and logistics service providers for enhanced multi-modal visibility and business intelligence. The integration will further enable clients to automate, collaborate and provide the visibility needed across their end-to-end supply chain processes.
MIT Sloan Study Quantifies Impact of Farmer Profitability
Agriculture is a significant part of the economy in most developing countries, yet many farmers persistently struggle with poverty. A key challenge is the lack of infrastructure to improve market access, price transparency, and competition.
As part of the research within the MIT Sloan School of Management Food Supply Chain Analytics & Sensing (FSAS) Initiative, Prof. Yanchong (Karen) Zheng and her coauthors studied efforts to improve the welfare of farmers using digital agricultural platforms.
The team found that such platforms can significantly increase farmers’ profits by 26% to 159% across a range of crops. They also demonstrated how a newly developed two-stage auction design can boost farmers’ profits by 60% to 158% for a commodity where launching the platform itself has a limited impact.
With a seed grant from the Tata Center at MIT, Zheng and MIT Sloan Prof. Retsef Levi, along with their PhD student at the MIT Operations Research Center (ORC), Somya Singhvi, started a collaboration with the state government of Karnataka in India two years ago to help assess the impact of the government’s digital platform called the Unified Market Platform (UMP) on market prices and farmers’ profitability.
Their paper, “The impact of unifying agricultural wholesale markets on prices and farmers’ profitability,” offers a rigorous econometric analysis that evaluates the impact of launching such a platform on farmers’ profitability and was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
This concludes our latest edition of This Week in Supply Chain Management Tech.
An Added Note to Readers– Supply Chain Matters will feature our This Week in Supply Chain Tech highlight series periodically as announcements warrant
