Roambee’s New Strategy—A Winner for Supply Chain Visibility?

Roambee is no stranger to technology innovation and strategy leadership in the supply chain visibility market. One of the first companies to achieve mainstream success as an Internet of Things (IoT) solution provider, Roambee made headlines in 2019 with its T-Mobile partnership pushing a Capital Expenditure (CAPEX)-free US$10/month model on a Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) device, including sending devices to, and recovering them from, customers. While this initiative wasn’t viable for various reasons, the ambition was clear: supply chain visibility needs to be made simple for customer adoption, and managed services are the way forward—not a device-first thinking.

More recently, Roambee has undergone a more fundamental transformation in its business, which continues to push simplicity of adoption. At the core of this transformation is what Roambee calls its “unified visibility platform,” a platform that is designed to offer both IoT and non-IoT visibility to customers based on the specific demands of their business. Breaking this down, the key changes are happening both across Roambee’s traditional IoT business and in its role as a visibility integrator; some of the most noteworthy changes are highlighted below:

1. Roambee’s traditional IoT business, the company is in the process of shifting its entire device portfolio from LTE-M to Cat.1bis to provide truly global coverage. These devices are limited to closed-loop or deterministic supply chains. Roambee expects the transition to be completed within a short period of time.
2. Roambee announced in May the launch of a smart label, also based on Cat.1bis. This offering expands on Roambee’s business, which has traditionally been focused on device reusability by enabling shipment tracking in open-loop scenarios where reverse logistics of devices is not possible. Thousands of these devices are currently in circulation, and Roambee expects this to scale significantly in the coming months.
3. Roambee seeks to address scenarios where customers are not willing, or have no need, to pay the IoT premium with its “sensor-less” offering—namely visibility at a low cost by aggregating data from carriers or contextual supply chain data feeds. Crucially, this latter offering may be offered by Roambee itself or by integrating any other carrier aggregation visibility provider that customers may be using, such as project44 or FourKites.
4. Customer ease of adoption is at the heart of this offering and is reflected in the pricing structure. Customers pay a single monthly platform and managed services fee, without initial setup costs, in which a pre-agreed number and mix of shipments (proportion of sensor-enabled versus sensor-less) is included. Within this fee, Roambee is also responsible for maintaining and building new analytics dashboards for its customers, rather than simply providing an off-the-shelf platform for customers to work in.

The goal of this evolution across IoT and non-IoT is two-fold. First is to provide a unified dashboard in which all visibility systems and data are rolled up into a single platform, instead of forcing customers to work in different systems for different parts of their supply chain, putting Roambee in more of an integrator role. Second is to extend visibility into the whole supply chain through a diversified offering with solutions for high-criticality and low-criticality open-loop and closed-loop shipment lanes—not just for the limited types of shipments IoT solution providers can traditionally address with their expensive devices.

Back in 2022, ABI Research published its Blueprint for Supply Chain Visibility. In this research, ABI Research highlighted the many approaches to supply chain visibility, from IoT solution providers and data aggregators to traceability platforms and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) data carriers. Each approach targets specific scenarios and use cases, but form an essential part of the whole; they do not compete so much as complement. The primary challenge identified was that of silos: vendors were laser-focused on developing and highlighting the advantages of their own technology approach and had limited collaborations with other parts of the visibility ecosystem. In this picture, the customer gets lost: solution providers focused not so much on the question of ‘how do my customers want to consume visibility?’, so much as the question of ‘how do my customers want to consume my visibility technology?’. To overcome this hurdle, ABI Research noted that the leaders in the supply chain visibility space would be those that acknowledged the value of different approaches and integrated many solutions into a single offering.

While efforts have been made since then to take a technology-agnostic approach, solutions remain—and, in fact, have become increasingly focused on a thin slice of the market. Vendors like Controlant and Sensitech are leaders in cold chain monitoring, while vendors like Overhaul are experts in cargo security. These solutions are extremely valuable to customers, who want experts in their domain and managed services, rather than “another IoT project,” but as noted, they serve only one slice of the market. Vendors like Powerfleet, Samsara, or CalAmp provide a unified visibility platform for their customers, but these vendors target fleet owners rather than shippers, which have very different requirements. Transportation Management System (TMS) and control tower vendors provide some of the most in-depth visibility thanks to their rich contextual knowledge of their customers’ operations, but for the most part, they rely on third-party visibility solution providers to plug into their platforms.

Within this context, Roambee’s strategy is impactful. As the supply chain visibility system market has matured and systems proliferated, Roambee’s strategy is to simplify the Information Technology (IT) challenge for customers by reducing the burden of integration across systems. Roambee is technology-driven in that it is using the latest technologies to offer solutions for customers’ operational challenges, but customer-first in that it is addressing one of adopters’ biggest pain points, which is an IT one: customers have too many platforms for visibility in different regions, modes of transport, and shipment criticality.

A question remains: is even one visibility platform one platform too many? Customers working in and around the supply chain day-to-day typically work in their existing enterprise systems—namely the TMS or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). These are the repositories of vast stores of useful data. Visibility solution providers now as a matter of course tap into these systems and other online data with webhooks or integrations to enrich the data they provide in their solutions. But fundamentally, that data generate the most value when pushed back into the TMS or ERP for users to ingest there. TMS and ERP vendors have made efforts to integrate with (or even acquire) existing visibility solution providers: Descartes, Transporeon, and Blue Yonder are prominent examples, working with IoT solution providers and data aggregators to facilitate their customers’ use of visibility technologies. These vendors are already responsible for doing a lot of the IT integration work, so where does Roambee fit in?

Two main ways. First, TMS and ERP vendors are not experts at ingesting all of these data and analyzing them in real-time: this is a role for more flexible and scalable platforms, which further allow management and control of devices in the field. Second, Roambee offers a single flat fee and a pre-made technology stack for all visibility needs, allowing customers, as well as TMS or ERP partners to integrate easily from a single environment. This single integration point transforms Roambee’s role, making it almost a visibility engine or operating system. It is not too difficult to imagine a world in which TMS vendors offer a “Powered by Roambee” visibility plug-in. In other words, customers may not act in it directly, but the “engine” serves as the underlying infrastructure for visibility across their supply chains. As Roambee focuses increasingly on onboarding third-party devices and on managed services through its visibility “control tower,” this role as an engine and integrator edges closer. 

Supply chains are a cost to enterprises. Excitement and sky-high Venture Capital (VC)-driven investment in supply chain visibility sometimes obfuscates the fact that adopters aren’t interested in new technology approaches in their own right, but in solutions that will reduce this cost. Solutions that put a high burden on a customers’ IT team or involve greater professional services or system integrator costs will find themselves fighting an uphill battle. Taking on the IT challenge and simplifying that into an easy-to-understand cost structure for customers is an important takeaway.

Vendors have started to understand that they are an island in an archipelago, and that customers will continue to use a wide variety of technologies within their operations. Success in the supply chain visibility space is a question of offering best-in-class solutions in one field, but also acknowledging the value of others and identifying the best ways to work with them. Vendors like ParkourSC, Antares Vision, Overhaul, and others have made important inroads into this over the last couple of years, and this trend will only continue to accelerate as vendors disentangle the various threads of the visibility market.

While Roambee is not the largest supply chain visibility vendor in the market, with estimated 2023 revenue of US$51 million and half a million active devices, this strategy shift is likely to point the way for how customers will want to consume visibility in the future. IoT solution providers for supply chain visibility have been evolving rapidly for the last 3 to 4 years, putting greater emphasis on software and analytics over hardware as they look to create value for customers. The next step is very possibly a full-blown integrator play, which some have touched but none have, as yet, mastered.