With approximately 90% of world trade transported by sea, Alpha Ori Technologies recognized a great opportunity to apply DataStax Astra DB to its SMARTship platform. “For 200 ships on our SMARTship platform in 2021, we calculated $5M in cost savings and 30,000 metric tons of emissions saved on behalf of our customers,” says Praveen Viswanath, Co-Founder and Enterprise Architect, Alpha Ori Technologies.
USE CASES
Astra DB for Supply Chain & Logistics
Supply chain management uses technologies such as barcode scanners and smart sensors to monitor product availability at factories and warehouses. Location tracking is also used within supply chain logistics platforms to track vehicle movement for transportation. All these technologies generate unprecedented amounts of data from the network edge. Furthermore, this data needs to be analyzed for insights so that decisions around cost efficiencies and process optimization.
Achieving these capabilities in the supply chain requires a modern data stack which can ingest massive volumes of data at a high velocity. The data stack also needs to support real-time analysis of this data via artificial intelligence and machine learning (AL/ML) models. This real-time analysis can enable insights for timely decisions on raw materials, finished goods inventories, shipping and delivery.
Astra DB provides the scale and availability to manage supply chain data volumes with low TCO and enables real-time analytics pipelines for immediate visibility and insights.
Scale Efficiently for Massive Volume of Data
Astra DB is a pay-as-you-go DBaaS which allows you to start with a small database and then grow the database as the components within your supply chain system increase. Whether it is a growing number of sensors, or more delivery vehicles in the fleet, it is easy to onboard more data in Astra DB with its serverless autoscaling. Astra DB allows you to easily manage the exponential growth of supply chain data.
Easy to Build Real-time Data Pipelines for Analytics
CDC (Change Data Capture) for Astra DB, powered by Astra Streaming, allows the creation of real-time data pipelines for analytics. With CDC, data from Astra DB can be immediately sent to AI/ML models and data warehouses (DWH). The supply chain can then be adjusted based on real-time product availability, factory/warehouse inventory, shipping and delivery fleet management. Astra DB based real-time data pipelines help optimize processes based on supply/demand and allocate assets with better service-level agreements (SLAs).
Multi-model Flexibility for Diverse Supply Chain Data
Since sensor, scanner data and vehicle fleet management data are diverse in nature, the data stack for supply chain needs to operate with a wide range of data formats. Astra DB provides multi-model flexibility with Document (JSON), REST, GraphQL and gRPC APIs to accommodate this wide range. Astra Streaming enables management of time series data and event stream processing. Together, Astra DB and Astra Streaming can provide the flexibility to handle all forms of supply chain data.
Network Edge to Any Cloud
Astra DB spans across multiple cloud regions and can be deployed in AWS, GCP and Azure. This allows Astra DB to be close to the edge locations across the world, where sensors and smart trackers are generating supply chain data. Astra DB and Astra Streaming also eliminate the overhead of installation and maintenance and there are TCO savings with pay per consumption and universal Astra credits on any cloud.
See Astra DB in action
Architecture for Supply Chain & Logistics
Astra DB manages data from various sources in the supply chain to monitor and track various elements of the supply chain. Astra DB in conjunction with Astra Streaming can enable real-time analytics for optimized supply chain systems.
Figure 1 - Architecture for Supply Chain & Logistics