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The physical supply chain goes digital

As manufacturers adopt new machine technology to produce “batch of one,” Cloudleaf gives the supply chain a digital makeover, as well.

A digital supply chain can deliver on-demand items from the plant floor to the customer.
A digital supply chain can deliver on-demand items from the plant floor to the customer.

Automation World's September cover story reports on the need for manufacturers to keep up with the consumer expectation that they can click on a website to order a product for next day delivery, all while maintain visibility into the entire process. In the feature story, "The Factory Faces the Amazon Effect," we dig into how CPG, food and beverage and pharmaceutical companies are applying new technology to build flexible processing and packaging machines that can produce a “batch of one,” that is, the ability to economically make one product.

While the story looks at machine technology that will enable quick mass customization in the production process, there is still a need to address how the supply chain must change to deliver these new on-demand items from the plant floor to the customer.

Enter Cloudleaf, a four-year old provider of digital supply chain technology that addresses this very specific market opportunity that sits between e-commerce and the edge. “We are playing at the intersection of two mega trends,” says Cloudleaf CEO Mahesh Veerina. “One is the digitization of commerce and the other is collecting data at the edge.”

The company’s offering is made up of three parts: It’s patented Sensor Fabric, a control center and cloud applications.The Sensor Fabric is an intelligent edge network made up of IoT sensors and gateways that collect unique location, condition and flow data to continuously deliver information to the cloud. The control center enables on-the-fly deployment, calibration and management of the Sensor Fabric, and the data is streamed to the cloud where a business rules engine transforms data into actions.

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