Coffee Importer: Predicting & Avoiding Product Degradation from Harmful Conditions

A coffee importer ships raw high-end coffee beans all around the world by truck and ship. The company uses Tive to monitor the coffee beans during transit, in order to predict and avoid quality degradation due to harmful environmental conditions. 

The Challenge

High-end coffee beans can degrade due to harmful temperatures or humidity levels. To avoid selling low-quality product, the importer tests each batch of coffee beans both before and after shipment, and either reduces prices or discards any shipments that have degraded. This creates large amounts of variability and waste within the supply chain, making it difficult to plan ahead and run the supply chain lean. 

The Solution

With Tive’s supply chain visibility solution, the company can monitor their goods in real time and pinpoint exactly when and where harmful environmental conditions occur. This helps them to reduce waste and costs associated with damaged product. In addition, this data will help them to model how bean quality changes with exposure to different conditions, enabling the company both to predict quality issues before the arrival of the shipment and to optimize routes to avoid harmful environments.

The Impact

With access to real-time data, the supply chain manager is able to predict when a shipment will arrive damaged, giving them time to order a replacement shipment or warn the end customer that product may be damaged or delayed. In addition, an analysis of harmful environmental conditions over many shipments makes it possible to identify particular routes that are more or less prone to harmful conditions. This gives the company the data they need to eliminate the root cause of issues and optimize the supply chain for future shipments.