Zetes was quick to recognise the need for efficient cooperation between supply chain stakeholders, in particular with respect to delivering quality and traceability, ensuring consumer protection and enabling anti-counterfeiting of brands and products.
To answer these challenges, Zetes Group is deploying its Collaborative Supply Chain suite across the EMEA region. The set of six standard and comprehensive solutions allows companies to boost the performance of specific processes while achieving end-to-end traceability.
The Collaborative Supply Chain suite consists of the following solutions: ZetesAtlas, ZetesMedea, ZetesAres, ZetesChronos and ZetesAthena, each of which addresses the specific needs of a segment in the supply chain – from packaging lines through to the store.
Acting as a layer at the top of Zetes’ solution suite is ZetesOlympus, which provides a unified data repository that can interface with different sources of information, including the above mentioned solutions and make this data available to various supply chain stakeholders.
“Our customers expect us to have an answer to a range of different problems, such as: how can I avoid costly mistakes at the loading dock, how can I track containers within my company, between my site and that of my suppliers, how can my central IT department distribute store apps to 500 subsidiaries efficiently and inexpensively?” explains Juan José Martinez, head of the Goods ID division at Zetes.
“At the same time, they are faced with the need for enhanced traceability along the supply chain, which involves collaborating with many other companies.”
“Zetes’ definition of a collaborative supply chain is one that supports process optimisation and end-to-end traceability,” adds Karin Parker, Zetes SA’s Executive Head of Sales and Marketing, “Each customer gets a solution that meets his specific requirements but, at the same time, allows critical information between supply chain partners – whether providers or customers – to be exchanged.”
A collaborative supply chain enables stakeholders to combat pressing challenges, such as counterfeiting and parallel markets and ensure greater consumer safety, as it enables more efficient recalls/returns management.
Parker adds, “We believe that an efficient collaborative supply chain should be enabled by a straightforward and standard approach that answers customers’ very complex challenges. What we offer them is a clean, coherent and standardised approach with a bird’s eye view.”
Through its managed service model, Zetes also offers customers the opportunity to purchase the solutions of its Collaborative Supply Chain suite on a monthly rental basis.
“This provides the desired process, and necessary hardware and software combined with a full maintenance service and, once the contract expires, recovery of the entire solution,” comments Parker.
“This approach offers customers the advantage of having a clear forecast of costs, as well as the flexibility to adapt the service to suite their changing needs, by adding or removing users/hardware whenever necessary.”
Another advantage Zetes offers today’s cash and time-strapped customers is cloud-based, centralised management of their applications.
“Through the MCL Mobility Platform, customers managing multiple sites, even in multiple countries, can easily and centrally manage and deploy applications and equipment without the need for expensive IT infrastructure and regardless of operating systems used,” says Parker.
