The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a stress test for supply chains everywhere and has revealed several weak spots in food and beverage, especially in the pork, poultry and beef markets—with farmers stranded with animals they couldn’t send to the slaughterhouse and shortages of these protein products at retail outlets.
One problem is there are many supply chains with siloed, incompatible data, not to mention supply chain participants still using clipboards and manual data entry. Those that have software systems find their system doesn’t work with others, and these cobbled-together systems are anything but real-time. Hardware support isn’t any more standardized.