NTT DATA and SAP Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) have launched Connected Product, a co-innovation solution to improve supply chain insurance management.

The solution helps the stakeholders monitor the location and environmental conditions of the goods in transit.

According to SAP, the solution is quite useful for tracking fragile goods, such as solar panels, bulk liquids, such as wine and olive oil, cheese, pharmaceuticals and vaccines.

“Besides reducing waste, the solution provides greater visibility across the entire supply chain and helps take necessary action in case of damage or delays,” the company said in a statement here on Tuesday.

“Global value chains are becoming increasingly complex due to rising geopolitical risk, trade growth, and volatility of material availability,” it said.

“Losses due to poor transportation conditions have become a multibillion-dollar problem due to extreme difficulty in identifying the cause of damage or when an incident occurred,” it added.

These challenges offer a great opportunity to overhaul the overall value chain with a solution that can provide real-time information on transport operations—from changes in temperature and humidity to whether the goods have been tilted—to all parties involved.

The solution was launched during the SAP Sapphire conference held in Tokyo on Tuesday.

Currently, the solution is working on a pilot with a Spanish logistics group and a German insurance company to track the condition of hundreds of containers moved by 20 shippers between Europe and Asia.

The pilot project will continue to run through September 2022, after which NTT DATA plans to incorporate the system into business operations, extending the solution to more international insurance and logistics companies.