The Inspectorio Roadmap: Our Vision and Product Pipeline

As we head towards the end of another monumental year of growth and product development at Inspectorio, we are taking time to reflect on our journey and the industry challenges that drive us forward, and announce our 2022-23 roadmap of new product releases.

Our achievements are built on a vision we have shared from day one: to digitize, automate, and optimize core production chain operations to drive data-driven collaboration and decision-making.

As Inspectorio’s co-founder, I can attest to the fact that our vision has not changed from the day our company was conceived.

For those new to our company and the way we operate, I want to explain the wider industry trends and challenges that connect us to our customers and partners. I also want to provide a glimpse of the new products we’re releasing in 2022 and 2023.

Expanding the depth of our product suite

Inspectorio currently has a suite of three products, which each address a key pillar of the production chain: Sight for quality management, Rise for compliance and sustainability management, and Tracking for production oversight.

Below we outline the new products and capabilities we’ll be releasing during the last quarter of 2022 and into 2023. For each, I’ll outline the ways they expand Inspectorio’s existing capabilities to new pillars of the production chain, extending our interventions and data capture further up and down the production stream.

Improved supplier risk management

The supply chain industry has evolved rapidly in recent years, with brands and retailers empowering their suppliers with more autonomy to manage disruption and take more ownership and control over their activities. To help suppliers meet these new expectations, we have devoted significant effort in 2022 to developing new ways to help them identify and proactively minimize quality risks.

The more effective oversight they exercise early in the production process, the greater the quality of their products, the lower the cost, and the fewer the defects.

For those suppliers that have already been using Inspectorio for In-line and Final Random Inspections, we will be optimizing our products and adding features to help catch defects earlier and apply those learnings to where defects occur downstream.

Laboratory Testing Data Management

Another point of focus for 2022 has been the development of a Laboratory Testing Data Management product. Today, vendors and factories are responsible for third-party laboratory tests to verify product quality and compliance, and brands and retailers must rely on those suppliers and third parties to ensure the tests happen. 

Unsurprisingly, the same problems that afflict other supply chain pillars — lack of centralization to track documentation, time-consuming data and communication siloes, and no visibility into the end-to-end process — are also present in Laboratory Testing Data Management. Another issue is that vendors and factories often need to account for the different standards and test report formats maintained at different laboratories.

The result is that testing management lacks the analytics to evaluate quality and performance, loses efficiency to manual processes, and takes a larger share of the budget than it should.

The data has convinced us that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help lower quality risk and investments in Laboratory Testing Data Management, particularly with the problem of excessive testing. That’s why we’ve been working on a comprehensive solution that digitizes and centralizes all aspects of the Laboratory Testing Data Management process. Scheduling is easily performed in-app, and our AI algorithms not only turn data into actionable insights, but also go a step further by identifying correlations between Laboratory Testing Data Management and product quality risk. 

Part of the impact of ML and AI is the fact that Inspectorio will be able to recommend when a laboratory test is needed or not, thereby reducing over-testing. This new product will go a long way toward helping our customers make the most of their resources.

Document Workflow Management 

These days, compliance and sustainability management involves a lot of documentation, and requires collaboration with multiple parties to receive feedback, signatures, and other necessary contributions. With the release of DocuFlow, our Document Workflow Management solution, those functionalities will now be native to the Inspectorio product suite.

DocuFlow is a unique solution that sets flexible sharing preferences and automates business workflows for more efficient document management. With DocuFlow, brands, retailers, and vendors can create, review, approve, share, and collaborate on documents in one digital platform. By decreasing manual work, DocuFlow fosters efficient collaboration and visibility while providing cutting-edge document security — all on one platform.

DocuFlow allows all collaboration, both internal and external, to occur without leaving the Inspectorio platform, so customers can connect with specific facility groups, create new groups, and set various levels of access control, and more. We expect to release this feature by the end of 2022.

ESG management in Rise

The past few years have seen increased pressure on suppliers for verified environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) metrics.

For an ESG program to deliver measurable results, companies must be able to monitor progress and track benchmarks across their production chain. Because suppliers and factories often lack the resources to operate the type of sustainability program requested by their clients, solving this problem involves working closely with facilities and being able to accurately evaluate and respond to risk.

We have significantly expanded the vision for our Rise compliance platform to include tools for managing a broader ESG program, which will be available in early 2023. By allowing customers to seamlessly map all of their environmental, social, and technical facility assessment data in one place (including third-party data), we enable more efficient sustainability operations.

Additionally, sustainability advisory reports and pre-configured questionnaires allow our customers to assess baseline ESG and compliance risk. Data-driven collaboration tools such as CAPAs and analytics will help streamline remediation and drive longer-lasting improvements. Sourcing decisions will also become clearer thanks to the ability to overlay sustainability risk data with production information, while real-time risk alerts will keep problems in your supply chain front-of-mind.

With these tools, companies will be able to capture key sustainability data like carbon emissions and water usage, while tracking progress toward thresholds and benchmarks.

Traceability 

One of the most exciting additions to our platform in 2023 is the Inspectorio Traceability solution. It’s our response to tightening regulations and companies’ pressing need to disclose and substantiate compliance claims and produce complete maps of their supply chains.

Our easy-to-use, centralized, collaborative traceability solution enables companies to better manage their supply chains to improve trading terms, identify and minimize risk, and reduce the use of unnecessary middlemen.

Inspectorio Traceability will be natively connected with our other products like Laboratory Testing Data Management and ESG reporting so production chain management can be distilled to one solution. With Traceability, it will be easy to understand end-to-end production status from raw material extraction all the way to the delivery of finished goods and ensure that partners are meeting set standards. 

This will be accomplished with Inspectorio Traceability through collaborative supply chain discovery and mapping, configurable tracing requirements that can be tailored to individual business needs, and comprehensive asset management to streamline data collection.

Inspectorio’s vital point-of-difference

As we journey with our customers and partners along our roadmap, it’s important to reflect on what sets Inspectorio apart from others in the market. It helps explain why we pursue specific solutions and measure the impact of their combined effect. I always come back to these five key reasons for the unique value of Inspectorio solutions. 

1. We cover multiple pillars of production, not just one.

Other companies tend to focus on just one specific pillar of the production chain, while we identify the pains that exist on each of the multiple pillars, offer solutions, and enable real-life interactions between different teams in the supply chain.

By connecting and standardizing data from all pillars of production on one centralized platform, we offer a new level of informed decision-making that’s unique among supply chain management solutions.

2. We stay true to our vision.

One of our first team members was a data scientist. That’s because our vision from the start was to leverage data for supply chain optimization.

By building our company around a core vision of data-driven insights, we created the right infrastructure from the beginning to embrace the power of AI and ML. As a result, we released products that featured:

• Full-suite interconnection
• Data integrity and standardization
• User-agnostic functionality

Many digital supply chain solutions are created by service providers for their existing customers. By contrast, every Inspectorio product is completely agnostic; we build them to facilitate collaboration with all players in the production chain.

3. We have best-in-class customer success solutions.

Simply put, we are obsessed with understanding and relieving the operational pain points of the more than 8,000 companies in our global ecosystem of brands, retailers, vendors, and factories.

We work closely with them to understand their needs, where they’re heading, and what stands in the way of their goals.

Our customer success team is integral to this process; they understand the challenges of rolling out new technology at scale. We invest in the successful implementation of our solutions across the supply chains so customers can obtain the widest range of the benefits we offer.

4. We offer flexible configuration to boost ROI.

We offer our customers the ability to configure their own processes and protocols. We adapt to our clients’ needs so they can achieve digitization without expensive customization, by gathering data that is relevant to each customer’s digital transformation.

To truly bring efficiency into their operations, we automate manual tasks and predict areas of high risk, so they can invest their resources more efficiently and build a risk-based quality, compliance, and sustainability program.

5. We provide network-wide performance insights.

Our network approach includes collecting anonymized data to offer our customers benchmarks and the ability to mitigate risk. The advantage is a wider visibility on activities across the supply chain for more effective performance management and decision-making.

The persistence of supply chain challenges

Why does the supply chain industry suffer from problems like siloed systems, limited communication, high operational costs due to multiple platforms, and a slow transition to data-driven operations?

We believe it’s due to the habit of viewing digitization itself as the end goal instead of as a means of accomplishing something greater. Many digital management solutions simply transform existing siloes into digital siloes and inefficient manual processes into slightly-less-inefficient digital processes. As a result, most management systems only support linear relationships between factory, supplier, and retailer. That is not the reality of our industry, which is a highly interconnected matrix of relationships.

When you implement digital systems that replicate the way things have been done manually, you’re not really transforming. Legacy systems were not built for interoperability or integration and usually feature different solutions for each production pillar. Communication still happens through external systems, which prevents everyone from having a single source of truth. Worse yet, employee time is wasted on the manual process of moving data between systems.

Smart computational design

If a management platform already contains all data points related to product and facility risk, it should be able to make recommendations from the beginning of the design phase to ensure the product can be manufactured effectively.

When launched, our AI-guided product risk tools will allow companies to streamline their product design process. Instead of having to repeatedly redesign products due to manufacturing constraints, teams can get it right the first time thanks to real-time input from the platform.

Sustainability, waste reduction, and social responsibility

Cloud-based supply chain management solutions like Inspectorio have a dramatic effect on a company’s carbon footprint and waste output. Cloud computing shifts production to dedicated data centers with incredible efficiencies of scale. Inspectorio helps companies to trim fat, unlock new levels of real-time visibility, and minimize the effort required to manage a global supply network. Together, these elements add up to tangible environmental and social impacts.

Inspectorio’s self-inspection capabilities have dramatically reduced the need for companies to fly personnel around the globe to audit factories. Our platform has fully digitized a multitude of wasteful manual processes to bolster efficient manufacturing. We’re now on track to unleash a truly comprehensive and groundbreaking traceability solution.

Combined with the revolutionary health and safety visibility provided by Rise – which we gave away for free during the pandemic to help companies keep their workforce COVID-safe – Inspectorio will continue making monumental contributions to the fight for a better, healthier, and more just global supply chain.

Our product development: dynamic or set in stone?

We are a company that embraces change, and our roadmap is no exception. Our product development methodology informs our roadmap by identifying and prioritizing new features based on what gives the most benefit to the most customers as efficiently as possible:

• Step 1: Identify users’ core pains
• Step 2: Develop a minimum viable product (MVP) solution
• Step 3: Put it in users’ hands as early as possible
• Step 4: Use feedback to rapidly deliver improved iterations

We defer to our customers as to what to prioritize, so what comes after the MVP is largely determined by their feedback, which helps us to rapidly deliver new value.

We closely follow industry trends and changes, and thanks to our recent Series B capital raising, we have the team we need to react to those changes and reinforce Inspectorio as the first-choice system for supply chain management.

Join our journey to better supply chains

On behalf of our entire team, I am proud to introduce the Inspectorio Roadmap presentation. We hope to continue inspiring others with our vision of what manufacturing can be, and we are honored to provide the tools to realize that vision today. 

To view the Inspectorio Product Roadmap 2022-23, click the image below.