A case study with Roambee Corp., about how the world's leading reusable packaging container (RPC) supplier managed to track hundreds of millions of units without having to tag each one separately. A finalist in the Supply Chain Innovator of the Year Award competition, sponsored by SupplyChainBrain and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals.

“Reusable is becoming the norm for sustainability,” says Vidya Subramanian, co-founder and vice president of products with Roambee. That trend elevates the importance of deploying RPCs, while simultaneously raising the problem of how to distribute them globally, and where to place them to match actual demand.

To address both of those issues, it’s important to understand the lifecycle of an RPC, from manufacturing to storage, shipment to the retailer and acceptance of returns. “Knowing the behavior,” Subramanian says, “tells us a lot about where inventory should be, and how much and the types of products that one should carry.”

Tracking RPCs at every stage becomes essential, but how do you do that when there are some 350 million units in circulation? It’s impractical to equip each one with a sensor. Both Bluetooth and radio frequency identification require expensive infrastructures, and cellular-based sensors can cost up to $30 apiece.

The answer lay in the concept of “group intelligence.” For a leading supplier of RPCs, Roambee equipped just 1% of the units with sensors, but that was enough to be able to extrapolate how the rest of the units were behaving.

Artificial intelligence helps to track the units throughout their journey, telling users how long an RPC stays in a particular place, how it’s being used, how much inventory is being carried and how the containers are generally being deployed. Behavior models are generated through AI-created neutral networks.

The technology results in a significant increase in productivity and improvement in utilization of those vital assets, Subramanian says.