Avery Dennison says its new Spring 2022 releases for the atma.io connected product cloud will focus on sustainability and waste elimination, including a tool that provides insights into the carbon footprint of products and another that analyses efficiency across the supply chain.
The atma.io connected product cloud, which was a finalist in Packaging Europe’s 2021 Sustainability Awards, is a platform that assigns digital IDs to products with packaging features such as RFID tags, QR codes, or barcodes, allowing companies to collect and share data about a product’s origins, material composition, and movement through the supply chain. The aim is to foster deeper relationships between companies and customers, promote transparency and sustainability, and make counterfeiting much more difficult.
According to Avery Dennison: “Because we can now track, store and manage all the events associated with each individual product (and its constituent parts) from source to consumer and beyond, it means unpreceded transparency. By knowing what each product is made of, it can be reused, remanufactured, or recycled more easily.”
One year on from atma.io’s launch, Avery Dennison claims that over 22 billion items are managed by the platform across the apparel, retail, food, and healthcare segments, with six of the top 20 apparel brands globally by revenue and four of the top 10 quick-service restaurants (QSRs) apparently using the platform.
The latest update to the platform will focus on helping brands to meet net-zero targets and reduce waste across the supply chain, according to the company.
Avery Dennison says atma.io will now feature Real-time Carbon Impact Analytics to provide brands with data-driven insights into the carbon footprint of products, including Scope 3 emissions. This tool will reportedly capture data from every stage of a product’s lifecycle, from raw materials to the consumer, which could help companies to comply with upcoming legislation such as the EU’s plans to introduce ‘digital product passports’ with the goal of boosting reuse and recycling.
In addition, third party manufacturing environmental impact data, including those provided for the apparel industry by the Higg Index, will apparently be factored into these insights. Avery Dennison explains that atma.io’s artificial intelligence can then deliver verifiable end-to-end visibility on brands’ emissions at an item level across the supply chain.
Avery Dennison adds that the Sustainability Facility Assessments feature also works with third party sustainability organisations, enabling atma.io to assign a sustainability score for supported facilities within the supply chain. Callouts can also be created to help keep track of the expiration dates of sustainability assessments.
Another new feature for atma.io is the Real-Time Waste Elimination Tool, which Avery Dennison says uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse and provide alerts on anomalies and inefficacies across the supply chain. The company highlights that this includes information about products that are overdue for movement at a pallet level or even isolated individual items within a warehouse that are close to perishing.
Avery Dennison says that this tool will help companies to take quick action to minimise product loss and provide adequate stock to meet consumer demands. This may be especially relevant for the food and pharmaceutical segments where spoilage in the supply chain and environmental sensitivities are a particular risk.
Avery Dennison’s new supporting Global Inventory Trace feature also tracks SKU distribution across the supply chain and creates alerts for items that have been on-site for longer than expected. Meanwhile, a Loss Prevention tool, also added as part of the Spring 2022 new features, generates alerts for suspicious activities happening within inventory, which could include possible counterfeit items.
Max Winograd, vice president of connected products at Avery Dennison Smartra, comments: “Every second, 300 new items are added to atma.io and join the billions it already manages. This is helping to drive savings and sustainability through traceability.
“We live in an ever-changing, data-driven world where constant access to timely, accurate insights is key to driving productivity and sustainability goals.
“The atma.io Spring ‘22 release will empower businesses to get meaningful insights from data that has often been in silos, allowing them to make informed decisions in real-time that can dramatically transform their business agility and accelerate their performance across the bottom line, people, planet and profit.”
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