Controlant, a provider of real-time digital supply chain visibility and cold chain solutions for the pharmaceutical, and food and beverage industries, recently acquired BI Manager and its product business units from Icelandic company Intenta.
As part of the acquisition, Intenta’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Bjarki Elias Kristjansson, will join Controlant as vice president of data, the companies said.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“The BI Manager product will further enhance Controlant’s Cold Chain as a Service Digital Visibility Platform and fits squarely with our objectives to provide our growing portfolio of customers with the data and communications tools they need to make proactive and responsive decisions about their logistics and supply chain strategies,” said Gisli Herjolfsson, CEO and co-founder of Controlant.
“Analytics and automation are key elements of our solution, in addition to our extensive platform integration service, which enable enterprises to aggregate data efficiently,” said Erlingur Brynjolfsson, CTO and co-founder of Controlant. “We are excited to add the BI Manager technology and the team’s expertise in this area to further enhance our business intelligence portfolio and R&D initiatives.”
Controlant’s real-time and reusable IoT data loggers travel with products from the manufacturer through last-mile delivery, including vaccines, pharmaceuticals, food, beverages, beauty and toiletry products, sending data into Controlant’s cloud-enabled software control tower platform. Data feeds into a data lake, where powerful business intelligence insights can be gleaned, including “what-if” scenarios, and other predictive reporting, to increase supply chain responsiveness, resiliency and agility, while fueling broader decision-making regarding selection of suppliers, carriers, packaging, and external points and ports of interest such as airports, harbors, and customs/border preferences.
Importantly, visibility and actionable insights also significantly reduce product loss and supply chain waste, increasing an organization’s sustainability.
Controlant’s current work with Pfizer, globally, as well as, the US Department of Health and Human Services and other Operation Warp Speed stakeholders, including state and local governments, in the distribution and storage of COVID-19 vaccines, serves as a tangible model for Controlant’s other work with global pharmaceutical manufacturers, logistics providers, and food and beverage brands across 115 countries.
Controlant’s implementation of a technology-driven Cold Chain Control Tower, along with Pfizer and USG stakeholders, accelerated the adoption of real-time technologies in the pharma and life sciences supply chain, and serves as a case study for near-future implementation of such technologies in direct-to-patient and consumer models, including clinical trials and last-mile delivery.
“The team and tools we built at Intenta have proven beneficial to the modernization of the supply chain and cold chain industry, as demonstrated through our work with Controlant leading up to its acquisition of BI Manager,” Kristjansson said. “Through Controlant’s acquisition of BI Manager, my team and I are better positioned to expedite innovation and adoption of Business Intelligence tools within pharma and life sciences, and food and beverage.”
