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Disruptive IoT solution for optimising the animal feed supply chain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - INSYLO (Disruptive IoT solution for optimising the animal feed supply chain)

Reporting period: 2019-02-01 to 2020-12-31

INSYLO is a Spanish technology-based start-up founded in 2013 with the mission to digitise the animal feed supply chain to livestock farms. We provide an accurate and cost-effective solution to monitor remotely the silos’ feed stock levels of the livestock farms. Using this information, we forecast the feed demand and allow feed suppliers to optimize the silos’ replenishment logistics (inventories, delivery routes, raw materials purchases, etc.). Our goal is to build a complete system that allows sharing data between farmers and feed suppliers and the optimisation of the whole feed supply chain.
Currently, feed supplier companies must manage the replenishment of thousands of silos used in livestock farms to store the animal feed. They receive a call or e-mail from the farmers when the feed stored in the silos is almost over. The supplier company must prepare and deliver the feed in 24-48 hours. The replenishment orders arrive at a moment notice and it is unpredictable, so it is not possible to organize production and delivering routes efficiently. More trucks than necessary are sent out, affecting the environment by pollution and the business by waste of money and resources.
Feed suppliers need an optimization tool to maximize their refilling efforts. INSYLO 's service will foresee the feed in the silos finishing and will arrange the transportation of the refill. The routes will be planned to maximize the number of silos refilled by the same truck in the less time possible.
INSYLO has designed and developed proprietary technology to measure the feed volume inside a silo and send the data back to our servers. The device is installed on top of the silos and measures the quantity of product stored with great accuracy thanks to a 3D volumetric camera. It also tracks the storage conditions measuring the temperature and humidity of inside the silo.
By the end of this project, a total of 343 INSYLO devices have been manufactured, deployed and thoroughly tested in Spain and UK. The platform, website and app have been fully prepared for data management and client interaction. The hardware and software have been fully optimised and prepared for commercial launch and the proprietary hardware technology has achieved protection through a patent in 2020.
During this period (M10 – M32) we have finished the development of the firmware, hardware and software of our commercial version for deployment to our testing sites in Spain and UK. Our main achievements have been the development of a reliable version of our hardware platform, an Over-The-Air (OTA) update system, an auto-calibration procedure and our volume estimation method, for which we have achieved a 97-99% accuracy through a variety of silos and environmental conditions. We have also fully developed the INSYLO Administration Platform for active interaction with our testers during the testing activity.
We have deployed 343 devices for our Large-scale testing and validated the technology during 17 months with successful results. During this time, we have also been granted national and international patent protection (including Germany, France, UK, Italy, Netherlands, USA, China and Mexico) and have developed a detailed roadmap to achieve certification in all our target market countries. We have developed a detailed economic and environmental impact analysis to showcase the positive impact of our technology.
We have reached out to over 50 prospective clients and signed 10 pre-commercial agreements to deploy devices for over 1,000 silos in EU and UK. We have also received seed funding from a first group of business angels and started negotiations with large venture capital firms interested in backing our commercial growth. We have updated our financial projections and project a 2.13% global market share by 2025, which will provide an accumulated revenue of 40.45 M€ with high profit margins.
We have published 3 scientific papers and participated in 11 on-site events and 2 on-line events. We have reached over 550 dissemination impacts.
INSYLO clearly goes beyond the state of the art. Currently, the vast majority of existing silos (>95%) don’t have any coupled technology to measure their filling level, so every week farmers must physically climb to the silo’s tops to estimate their load or acoustically guess it hitting them with a mace. The alternative to this manual and inefficient method are either expensive load cells or inaccurate single point level sensors (ultrasound, radar, laser…) that have measurement errors of up to 20 %.
INSYLO is the first cost-effective solution able to measure accurately silos’ feed level thanks to its proprietary 3D volumetric camera. Moreover, by leveraging the power of big data and artificial intelligence, our solution is capable for the very first time of forecasting feed demand (i.e. refill orders) and organize feed trucks delivery routes to optimize them.
We have achieved a market-ready solution that has proven able to disrupt the current feed supply chain. The optimization of the feed-stock inventories, production batches, delivery routes and raw materials purchases translates into savings of up to 500 € per silo and year for the farmers and feed suppliers.
Moreover, from an environmental point of view, the optimisation of the feed delivery routes has demonstrated a real reduction of about 15% of the distances run by the trucks which has a direct impact on the reduction of CO2 emissions.
From a social point of view, farmers will benefit from a solution that will help them in their daily routines. On the one hand, they will avoid climbing to the top of the silo to check the feed level, which reduces occupational hazards. On the other hand, they can be confident that they will never run out of feed, which brings peace of mind.
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